The Intuitionist

Part ONE

Aspirants to luxury often opt for red and gold, hues long-soaked into their mentalities as the spectra of royalty. There are no kings these days, in these cities. Just moles. Red drapes two stories tall hang from assembly-line pins, floor to ceiling, cinched at the waist by gold sashes and shod with gold tassels. Gold trim traipses the edges of the red tablecloths, a scheme repeated in miniature on the napkins nuzzling the men’s crotches. In the deep red carpet beneath their feet gold creatures, refugees of no identifiable myth-system, writhe in pools of lava. Red and gold, damnation and greed. Gold the trumpets and saxophones, red the cheeks and noses of the musicians from all their plangent huffing. In case anyone finds himself lost, in case anyone wonders what this spectacle is that proceeds in Banquet Room Three of the Winthrop Hotel, a humble placard just inside the chamber offers, FUNICULAR FOLLIES. Gold script on red. The hapless wayfarer, en route to the hotel cocktail lounge, has been duly warned.

Rick Raymond and the Moon-Rays, smart in white tuxedos, summon ditties upbeat in tempo and inconsolate in lyric from the instruments they have purchased on lay-away. Rick Raymond notices that the elevator inspectors do not dance. This is not a solid rule among their clan so much as the tasteless fruit of learned helplessness. They don’t know where to place their feet, have untold psychic bruises still tender from adolescent embarrassments and don’t, collectively, dance. It is a shame, for they love the music despite their unfortunate malady. This is the music they no longer hear on the radio; it has been crowded out into unstable frequencies by new rhythms. It is slipping away. But Rick Raymond and the Moon-Rays are pros. They’ve weathered much worse gigs than this. The unpleasantness at the Mortonswieg wedding, to name one recent example. With a crowd this sedentary, so intent on flagging down the help for refills, the band needn’t worry about nettlesome requests. The music required for the upcoming acts is uncomplicated, the format of the festivities loose. A no-hassle night before an audience of drunks — Rick Raymond is glad, for his band is notoriously sloppy.

Rick Raymond pushes the blue ruffles of his tuxedo shirt away from his chin, where they tickle. He sings about a girl named Mary Lou and her eyes so blue. The band gets a lot of gigs on account of Rick’s preternatural resemblance to a popular singer and matinee idol. He is not above stealing some of that singer’s more famous moves, like he is now, cradling the microphone stand as if it were some swooning lass, petting invisible blonde hair. Your eyes so blue, he croons.

Quite the ham, Rick Raymond, but look at these pigs. This affair is a few bubbles short of champagne. The snouts of these men are up at their plates, nudging shrimp cocktails, which look like bones floating in blood. Their tuxedos have identical wide lapels, and a close inspection of all the labels on the inside pockets will attest to the handiwork of a certain Ziff Brothers, 10 % DISCOUNT IF YOU BRING A FRIEND. The shrimp cocktails are reinforcements, following greasy battalions of tiny hot dogs and stunted egg rolls (the snacks perched on silver trays, wallowing in small brown pools of oil, dripping amniotic fluid). These appetizers appease the stomachs of the men, which have been thrown into tart consternation by the sudden influx of free whiskey. First drinks, then appetizers and drinks, then follies and drinks, and dinner and drinks, always, on their high holy day, this most august occasion, the 15th Annual Funicular Follies. Biggest night of the year for these shamen of the vertical vehicular.

Rick Raymond sings of Peggy Sue and her love so true. Fingers root after the final residue of cocktail sauce, tongues lick fingers. And now cigars! Early this morning the elevator inspectors, pep of step, dutifully filed into the Pit to confront their scattered desks (addresses of miscreant cabs, all-points bulletins on cabled fugitives). Discovered five cigars in that paper disarray, five cigars apiece from Big Man Chancre, to be smoked at this hour, now, in this room. Holt started the cigar ritual during his administration but nobody remembers that now. Chancre has usurped his predecessor’s munificence by gifting five, not that paltry four cigars. Gray blue genies escape the caves, these elevator inspector gorges, and commune by the ceiling. Confer, trading notes on the dynamics of air on this northern continent, free from any form of ventilation.

They sit at the edges of the round tables, the elevator inspectors, and smoke cigars and trade misinformation about which of their comrades will perform this evening, and no one needs to remark upon the importance of this night, the forty-second anniversary of the Department of Elevator Inspectors. Retired inspectors boast of their private sector sinecures, the beat cops update their elders on the mood of the street these days. They share irregularities, shady confidences, exploits, tales of graft, while stealing the occasional glance at the Internal Affairs table, strategically placed at the back of the hall, and only half full. The IAB boys have only been invited here tonight out of the vestiges of ancient solidarity, polite gesture. They are not wanted and know it. Mostly they come for the free food and drinks and the whores at the cocktail lounge down the hall. They crack wise and angle scuffed brogues on the empty seats at their table, taking full opportunity of their proximity to the kitchen door to raid each new arrival of the hors d’oeuvre tray. Except for one man, a carbuncular specimen who is intent, who is not drinking, who is very much on the case even though he punched out hours before.

Pretty baby, Rick Raymond concedes, you drive me crazy.

They have left the wives at home, what wives remain to these men. Elevator inspection is hard on a marriage, a family. Once in a while, with greater frequency as the night stumbles on, one of the inspectors makes a clumsy grab for one of the cigarette girls, who are as a group blonde and young and endowed by the Creator with exceptional breasts or legs, but never both. Squeal and smile at the swatting paws. Each fumble is followed by a chorus of hearty guffaws from the rest of the table. And the man joins the laughter of his comrades and shrugs off his failure while simmering inside. Because these minor escapes of ass and tit are no joke: this is real hunger. Scenarios, as they will, unfold. Her cigarette tray, the candy and mints and tobacco, the humiliating detritus of his life, is what separates them, willfully schismatic. Can she be persuaded to forgive him his paunch, his retreating hairline, slurred speech, this young girl, this forgiving young nearsighted girl lays down her cigarette tray. He whispers. She agrees silently, it is all in her eyes: her eyes are wide in knowledge of his need. Forgiving. Outside the banquet hall at the reception desk, the clerk winks man-code. The room key is red and gold in his hand.

Lila Mae picks up empty plates from the tables of her coworkers. No one recognizes her.

It’s time. Rick Raymond taps the microphone and the men stir from their scuttlebutt and applaud. From more than one man’s oily lips issues that whistle one only hears in crowds. Rick Raymond says into his mike, “Welcome to the Funicular Follies, inspectors!” His words are obscured by the roar. “Settle down, gentlemen, the fun’s about to start. You guys having a good time tonight?” More roar, a shattered glass or two. “Well hang on to your hats, because this opening act is sure to give you even more lift!” The snare drum is only too eager to abet this pun. “May I present to you, fresh from a two-week sellout tour of Australia, the Great Luigi!”

There are shouts of gratitude and amazement from the assembled, heads turn to seek out Chancre at his table near the stage. It’s Chancre’s doing, after all, no one doubts that. The Great Luigi begins his number, something from some opera or whatnot, they can’t understand the words anyway — more important than the song is the man’s appearance, the signal Chancre is sending the week before the election. The famous tenor is an international sensation. He’s sung for heads of state, diplomats, dictators of small countries with enormous mineral wealth, and here he is at the annual function of the Department of Elevator Inspectors. This is Johnny Shush’s gift to Chancre; the mobster can’t be here tonight, not with the increasing attention of the Feds to his sundry operations, but he can send an emissary from his underworld kingdom, demonstrate his influence, and by extension, Chancre’s. More than one person here tries to figure out what the mob has on the Great Luigi (wears a dress?) but then doubles back: no point thinking about Johnny Shush’s business. Chancre makes a great show of mouthing the words with the tenor even though it’s obvious from a cursory inspection that he’s never heard note one of this song before. Appearance is everything. The Great Luigi lifts his head to address a dusty chandelier: this is no grand theater. He had to prepare his number in a supply room off the kitchen, next to a stack of canned peas. The long white tails of his tuxedo drag unenthusiastically. When the last note recedes, Chancre’s out of his seat rousing a standing ovation from his troops. The tenor nods curtly, clicks his heels and is out of here as fast as his spindly legs allow.

Rick Raymond leaps into the breach. “Talk about feeling small. What a talent, eh my friends? This next act will have a tough time following that up. Did someone say up? Cause that’s where these girls will take you. Let’s hear a loud elevator-inspector welcome for United Elevator’s Safety Girls!” There is no need to ask these men for applause, for they swat their hands together in rapacious glee, and hoot and growl for good measure. This is the fifth appearance of the Safety Girls, and every one has been a triumph of lower impulse. It is not clear what the Safety Girls do in between this night and the annual elevator trade show. Perhaps they practice their kicks and steps, their inviting smiles. This attraction, too, has another meaning: Chancre endorses United in their ad campaign. Chancre could have gone with Arbo, or American, but he went with United, and they are grateful.

Rick Raymond and the Moon-Rays help out with an energetic rendition of a song from a movie musical that was popular a few years back. The twenty Safety Girls, in their short and tight crimson outfits, contribute their fit bodies and off-key voices. They’ve changed the lyrics. Instead of the familiar “All I want is Lady Luck,” the elevator inspectors are rewarded with “All I want’s to get you up.”

Lila Mae thinks, her dues are paying for this.

He left her a note telling her to come, so she did. The note read, See you at the Funicular Follies. I have a surprise for you. N. The note is hidden in her shoe right now, slightly lumped from dried sweat.

She found the note under her door this morning after a Tuesday of anxious and aimless cogitation. No work, no house, she spent the majority of the day in the downstairs parlor, in the hollow of a large leather chair. Rereading Fulton, immersed in the grimoires. From time to time Mrs. Gravely offered her a snack, from time to time Natchez would nod or smile in the doorway and continue on to his chores. Mr. Reed and Lever were out on some business, but Natchez still went through the elaborations of secrecy. She found it endearing, boyish, and she waited for him to visit her last night. He did not. She found a note under her door this morning.

The House parlor contained in its sturdy shelves the entire corpus of Intuitionist lore, from the recent pamphlets smuggled out of distant Romania to the hopeful minutes of the Intuitionist societies in countries yet unblessed by the wonder of vertical transport. It all flowed from the books she held in her lap, Volumes One and Two of Theoretical Elevators, and it all meant something differently now. Fulton’s nigresence whispered from the binding of the House’s signed first editions, tinting the disciples’ words, reconnoting them. Only she could see it, this shadow. She had learned to read and there was no one she could tell. She understood that the library would be empty if these scholars knew Fulton was colored. No one would have worshipped him, his books probably would never have been published at all, or would exist under a different name, the name of the plagiarizing white man Fulton had been fool enough to share his theories with. She read the words in her lap, horizontal thinking in a vertical world is the race’s curse, and hated him. She had been misled. What she had taken for pure truth had been revealed as merely filial agreement. And thus no longer pure. Blood agrees, it cannot help but agree, and how can you get any perspective on that? Blood is destiny in this land, and she did not choose Intuitionism, as she formerly believed. It chose her.

She ate by herself at the dinner hour, at the head of a long mahogany table attended by empty chairs. Natchez served her a thin brown broth, then pink lamb and a yellow paste of vegetable matter she did not recognize. Natchez did not speak beyond the parameters of his duty, communicated their understanding instead through laden glances. He acts as if this is a spy game, she thought. He did not come last night. He slipped a note under her door asking her to come to the Funicular Follies.

She did not have a plan, which is unlike her. She stared at the distinguished white awning of the Winthrop Hotel, watched the doormen in their red coats ingratiate themselves with the arrivals and departures, fingers nimble on the brims of their black caps. She cannot afford to be seen by her colleagues, not after her three days of unexplained absence. She cased the building. From the modest forty stories and staid, circumspect ornamentation of the facade, she estimated the age of the Winthrop Hotel at thirty years, figured the elevators for reliable Arbo Regals, the late models with the oak interiors and brass handrails. Elevator operators, one sure hand on the wheel. She discovered the service entrance in the alley on the north side of the building.

A thin man with a slight, pouting face looked up from his clipboard and informed her, “You’re late.” He quickly hustled over to her, grabbed her arm. She allowed him to touch her, she allowed herself to be led down the hallway, past walls of the alienating gray made famous in prisons and schools across this country. They rounded a corner, and another, the man walking swiftly as if, she thought, afraid of these tight quarters, the tottering linens and stacks of dishes. They stopped at a black door whose chipped edges revealed strata of old paint of many colors and years. He said, “You’ll find your uniform in here,” adding after a sure appraisal, “We should have your size.” Her hand darted for the doorknob and the man turned on his heel. He said, “Tell the agency that seven o’clock means seven o’clock and that if they don’t get their act together,” he searched for the right threat as he trotted away, “we’ll be forced to take our business elsewhere.”

The Winthrop Hotel did indeed have her size, previously worn by her menial double as she ripped off sheets, scrubbed toilets, avoiding eye contact with the people she served. It was the first time in months she had worn a dress. She felt exposed around her ankles, and as she shook her shoulders to force the black dress into comfort, she touched her neck to adjust her tie and found white lace instead. Her suit hung on a rack with the coats and day clothes of the rest of the help. Their clothes were sensible and betrayed the cumulative rough caresses of untold ablutions in basins and tubs, patient scrubbing. Her jacket was flat on the hanger but still seemed to retain her shape, thanks to all those sharp angles. She wasn’t wearing proper shoes but did not concern herself. She thought, they won’t be looking at her shoes. They won’t be looking at me at all.

The big test came when she first knocked open the swinging doors of the kitchen and shuffled into the banquet room, having been directed to a platter full of miniature pizzas by the kitchen manager, who had greeted her emergence from the changing room with a terse, “Get to it.” This is her first Funicular Follies. She understood that this night was for all the Department but her. She went through the effort of pulling her hair back into a knob on her scalp but in retrospect considers this unnecessary. They do not see her. The colored help brings the food and clears the tables, the white waiters refill the drinks. They ask the white waiters about the action at the cocktail bar, but do not ask the colored help for anything except for what they offer from the hors d’oeuvre tray. Food. They see colored skin and a servant’s uniform. As an inspector she confronts superintendents, building managers, who do not see her until she shows her badge. In the Pit, she toils over paperwork next to these men every day. In here they do not see her. She is the colored help.

Natchez said he had a surprise. Where is his surprise?

She returns with a new fork for Martin Gruber to replace the one he tossed across the room at Sammy Ansen. (She adopted a circuitous route to avoid Pompey’s table: she doesn’t want to press her masquerade, but considers strychnine. He drinks copiously. He is not one of those grabbing at the white cigarette girls’ gams. He knows better than that.) She has wiped off any visible remains of this new fork’s recent trip through the grease and rinds of the garbage pail and envisions the extravagant bacteria metropolis that will thrive in his stomach. Invisible and insidious. Like her. She places the fork next to Gruber’s plate and he doesn’t even look at her, contemplating instead the beckoning recess where one particular Safety Girl’s legs meet.

Rick Raymond says, “I think we all might need a cold shower after that one, eh boys?” The saxophone shrieks suggestively. “Maybe we should shift gears and let you boys cool off. This next act will probably do it for you. Sirs, the Funicular Follies are proud to present on the stage — the return of Mr. Gizzard and Hambone!”

The Moon-Rays start in with some quick ragtime as the two men enter from stage right. The inspectors are going mad. The skinny man wears a white T-shirt and gray trousers. Clothespins hold his suspenders to his pants. The fat man wants to be a dandy, but his green and purple suit is too small for him, exposing his thick ankles and wrists. Their elbows row back and forth in unison and their feet skip ’cross the stage to the music. Their faces are smeared black with burnt cork, and white greasepaint circles their mouths in ridiculous lips. Lila Mae is still, an empty glass in her hand. Underneath the minstrel makeup, she recognizes Big Billy Porter as the fat man and Gordon Wade as the skinny man.

When the applause stops, they quit cavorting and slap their thighs with a flourish. Big Billy Porter (Mr. Gizzard, evidently) says, “Hambone, you ole nigguh, where you git dat nice hat you got on yo head?”

Wade answers, “I got it at dat new hat stoe on Elm Street.”

“Tell me, Hambone, did it cost much?”

“I don know, Mr. Gizzard — de shopkeeper wasn’t dar! Say, you evah hear de one about de fine genimun?”

“What fine genimun dat be?”

“Dis fine genimun is walking home late one night when he come on dis nigguh lying down on de street.”

“Do say, Hambone. He drunk?”

“He look lak you on Satday naht, all drunk all over hissef! Now dis fine genimun want to help him out, so he ax de nigguh what was lying dere, ‘Do you live here?’ An de drunk say, ‘Yazzum, suh.’ An de genimun ax de nigguh, ‘Would you like me to help you upstairs?’ An de nigguh say, ‘Yazzum, suh,’ and dey go up in de building. When dey git up to de second floe he ax, ‘Is this your floor?’ ‘Yazzum, suh,’ dat nigguh say. Den de genimun start thinking, I don wanna face dat nigguh’s wife — she liable to throw some hot grits on me fuh bringing her man home drunk lak dat. So he open de first door he see and shove de nigguh through it, den he go back downstairs. But lo and behole, what do he see when he git hissef outside agin?”

“I don know, Hambone — what do he see?”

“When de genimun git hissef back outside, dey anudda nigguh drunk on de street. So he ax dat drunk, ‘Do you live here?’ ‘Yazzum, suh.’ ‘Would you like me to help you upstairs?’ ‘Yazzum, suh.’ So he did take him up de stairs and put him in de same door with dat first nigguh. Den he go back downstairs. And guess what — dey anudda nigguh on de street again! So he walk over tuh him, but befoe he get dere, de nigguh stagga ovah to a policeman and cry, ‘For God sake, suh, potect me from dis white man. He be doing nuttin all naht long but tekkin’ me upstairs an trowing me down de elevator shaft!’ ”

Even though she knows what she will see, she looks over at Pompey. His mouth is cracked open with laughter. He slaps the table and shakes his head.

Billy Bob Porter-as-Mr. Gizzard says, “Hambone, dat’s terrible. I’s regusted!”

“Regusted? Doan you mean dis-gusted, Mr. Gizzard?”

“Dis gusted, dat gusted, I be all dat. Say, Hambone, what’s say you and I tell dese good folks bout de ole man who go tuh see de doctuh?”

“Mr. Gizzard, dat sound lak a perfect idea! I be the ninedy-year-ole man and you be de doctuh. Hello doctuh!”

“What’s the matter with you, young man?”

“I ain’t young, so yuh can keep yo bedside matter. I gots me a bad problem.”

“Well what is it?”

“Well doctuh, ever-time I go to visit dat woman uh mine, de first … is good, real good … At de end of de secon, I have tuf rest at least for ten minutes … I can get up de third, but it take me such a long time dat I sweat and get shaky … And de fourth be almost impossible!.. Sometime I think I bout to die on de spot!”

“Well, nigger, how dare you, at your age, talk about making love three, four or even two times?”

“What can I do, doctuh? I got no choice — de dam building got no elevator and she lives on de fourth floor!”

“Hambone, dat’s too much fuh me! We better be on our way befoe my gut fall out. You wan I should tell you bout de man in de elevator befoe we go?”

“What man in what elevator, Mr. Gizzard?”

“Dey dis man in an elevator all by hissef, Hambone. De car stop and in step dis beautiful lady wit de long hair and de nice eyes. Two floes later she reach over an push de Stop button. She takes off all her clothes and say to de man what was in dere, ‘MAKE ME FEEL LAK A WOMAN!’ So de man, he take off all a his clothes, throw dem on top of de woman’s clothes and say, ‘Okay, do the laundry!’ ”

“Mr. Gizzard, I do believe I hear dat wife a yo’s callin yo name.”

“Well, come along, Hambone. It’s dinnuh time and dat chicken she fried ain’t goan las long!”

They receive a standing ovation for this. Wade throws his cap out into the audience and two inspectors wrestle over it. The kitchen door swings shut on Lila Mae’s back. In the kitchen, the other colored workers do not speak on what they have just seen. They stack dirty plates in the plastic tray next to the dishwasher, nibble at leftover shrimp. Lila Mae does not mention it either, telling herself it is because she does not know the silent women she has been working with, whom she has not talked to all evening for her concentration on the Follies. She tricks herself that that is why she does not mention what she has seen, tells herself it is because she is undercover and speaking to them might trip her up, a dozen other reasons. She thinks the other women are so beaten that they cannot speak of the incident, when all of them, Lila Mae included, are silent for the same reason: because this is the world they have been born into, and there is no changing that. Through the porthole in the door, Lila Mae sees Pompey rub laughter-tears from his eyes, lean against Bobby Fundle to steady himself. See, he’s laughing so hard he can hardly steady himself.

Lila Mae reenters the banquet room with a glass pitcher of water.

At the Internal Affairs table, Arbergast looks up quickly. Something bothers him about the woman who just refilled his water glass. His ears stand up, angle back.

The boys are out of it at this point. Chuck, for example, passed out long ago, and his head rests on his white plate. Pink fingers grope at ties, loosen ties, unbutton the top buttons of strangling shirts. Rick Raymond treads valiantly in this dead pool of lassitude, says, “I know you boys are hungry, but we have one more act before we wheel out the troughs. May I present, gentle inspectors, without further ado, the man who made tonight possible: the Chair of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, Mr. Frank Chancre!” Groggy heads swivel toward the Big Man’s table. But he’s not there. They see his lieutenants, his protégés, sitting there to show the assembled who’s in favor, which of their number have gained entree into the Chair’s good graces, but no Chancre. The lights overhead click out except for the ones up front on the stage. The drummer, as his kind are wont to do, beats with anticipation.

Lila Mae refills water glasses.

Rick Raymond bites his nails.

Internal Affairs Inspector Arbergast leaves his seat.

In the shadows at the side of the stage, the figures of men can be observed straining. Ropes levitate from the stage, the light catches their fine hairs, describes movement right. Slowly extricated from the murky left is Chancre, standing on a wooden platform. His costume is familiar to all present from the engravings of the 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations: the clothes Otis wore when he delivered unto the world its first Safety Elevator. He is standing on a replica of that renowned contraption, his hands cocked against his hips, just as they are in the advertisements for the United Elevator Co. The men at the side of the stage grunt the elevator across by painful inches, to better spool excitement. Lila Mae can’t believe he has the gall. To even compare himself to Otis, to sully their imaginations of that great day with his corpulent horror. She would have liked to see Mr. Reed’s reaction to this scene, but after a few rounds of handshaking at the beginning of the event, Mr. Reed and the tireless candidate departed the Follies. She would have liked to see their faces.

The elevator is center stage now, wood and divine despite Chancre’s perversion. This is the one that started it all, enabling the metropolis, summoning them into tumultuous modernity. The blueprint of the first elevation. The assembled feel tremors assail their skin. This is where it all comes from, this moment, their solemn mission through the city’s unforgiving and neon boulevards, past the angry facades of tenements and department stores and high-rises and office buildings. Even after years on the street, the gradual numbing of their souls to their dirty work, seeing that magnificent creation gives them all a chill. “Gentlemen,” Chancre begins, “we live in a time of great calamity. Nations clash and a great noise is heard across the land.” Arbergast is a good ways from his seat, almost at the figure who intrigues him. He thinks he knows that woman, that silhouette in the darkened room who does not move. “Babies go to bed hungry. What we took for granted in our youth — safe schools for our children, safe neighborhoods, safe streets — are quickly vanishing, lost in the moral swamp our communities have become. But there is one shining light, one ray of hope in this darkness, one thing that is still safe. And it is because of you gentlemen, because of your good work.” She does not notice his progress toward her, Arbergast sees, she’s transfixed (appalled, actually) like all the rest by Chancre’s speech. He is almost upon her, his quarry. “Fellow elevator inspectors, this night is yours. It is a dirty and thankless job, and you have performed it above and beyond the call of duty. Sirs, it is because of you that civilians,” he pauses here to withdraw scissors from his jacket and poise them at the rope reprieving his platform from gravity, “can ride vertical conveyance in this glorious metropolis and say, ‘All Safe, Gentlemen, All Safe.’ ” He dangles there, his intonation signaling to the entranced audience that he will repeat Otis’s hallowed declaration once he cuts the rope and is saved by the safety spring. Arbergast grabs the shoulder of the woman, she turns, he sees the face of Lila Mae Watson. He hears a loud crash. He sees Chancre writhing in pain on the stage, grabbing his knee and staring incredulously at his leg, which is splayed out to an unlikely angle. The spring did not bite into the notches along the inside rails, and the Chair of the Department of Elevator Inspectors has fallen. The inspectors are out of their seats and launching toward the stage. Their shouts echo in the room. Chancre screams. Arbergast looks at his hand, which just a moment earlier grasped the black material of a Winthrop Hotel domestic’s uniform. His hand is empty. She’s gone.

* * *

In Huntley’s Department Store the people need and need less once they leave. Arms full, shopping bags’ plastic loops cutting into their palms, bearing gifts: new watches equipped with glow-in-the-dark radium dials so you can know the time even in the dark; cinch belts in all the rediscovered pastels from overseas, hot now, get them while they’re hot; Cuban-heel pumps and alligator purses so coarse and smooth in the light, dizzying tactility; hypnotic suggestion girdles and air rifles and foxtail caps. Exhausting, all that baggage, now is what makes it heavy, all that invisible now-freight at the bottom of the pillage-sacks, next to receipts of purchase and coupons for the next reduced populuxe pleasure. Marvin Watson collapses the metal gate, it always sticks a bit but he knows how to ease it into itself, he knocks down the door arm and shouts, “Second Floor: Ladies Clothes. The Little Miss Shop, Ladies’ Shoes and Linens.” The animals push by him, jostling neighbors and friends and the Mayor’s niece, trampling young children under Cuban-heel pumps to gain the floor, what the floor has arrayed out there. Two thirsty women, politely disheveled, wait to board Marvin’s elevator. They are about to enter the next stage of today’s spree, having finished with the Second Floor; postcoital lassitude writ in their postures, they fan themselves with advertisements, still thirsty for more, for what’s on the higher floors before they must return to home and husbands and children. They want to go higher, and Marvin Watson, elevator attendant of Car Number Two in Huntley’s Department Store, is the man who takes them to the next level. Down, too, if they want to, but only after he’s taken his baby up to the top floor. Sometimes they ask him questions. “Where would I find a toy for my son? He’s six,” and “Where’s the ladies’ room?” Never looking at him. They are in an elevator and thus passengers and must participate in the game, staring straight ahead or up at the waffling arrow of the floor indicator, but never left or right, at the colored man who pulls the control lever. So he only sees their faces when they enter the cab, delighted for a second that their carriage has arrived and then suddenly reminded of the journey itself, rushing into the device so as to turn around and face the only exit as soon as possible. Most of the time he sets them straight, tells them first and fourth floor is where the rest rooms are, but once in a while he lies. Let them find their own way through this labyrinth. This hell of stuff.

He has worked here for twenty years, driving the control lever into its seven slots, opening and closing the doors to the floors. Studied engineering at the colored college downstate, saw North: the big cities he knew were coming, the citadels pushed from the planet’s guts like volcanoes and mountains to take the sky. He knew the next step, had a beautiful woman and a child sleeping in that woman. In magazines he’d read about the new field of elevator inspection, and it seemed like a good opportunity for a man like him, an industrious fellow like himself. The secretary handed him a package when he walked in the door. He returned it to her thin white hands and informed her he was here for an interview. Wasn’t a messenger boy. When he stood before the man’s desk, the professor glanced up from his papers for only a moment, the time in which it takes to say, “We don’t accept colored gentlemen,” not meeting Marvin’s eyes and returning quickly to his paperwork.

Old man Huntley was hiring, or so the newspaper said. He needed some colored boys to run his elevators.

“Third Floor,” he says to the rabid pack behind him, “Boys’ Clothes, Sporting Goods and Boys’ Shoes,” and a flurry of multicolored hats gushes out to his left. It’s not a race. Sometimes he wonders what would happen if he shoved the lever as they ran out of his cab, but knows that Number Two will not move, neither up nor down, when the doors are open. They’re not built that way.

He wanted to be close to elevators so he took the position at Huntley’s. Saw North vanish until the only North was the top of the road as it dipped over the hill.

The man enters the car on the first floor and declares, “Department of Elevator Inspectors.” He flips open his badge, that gold nova, to the agitated wives, who suddenly see their afternoon assignation get complicated. “Everybody out.” He is authority. The white men in town have their own armor as they walk through the squares and up stone steps, totems of minute affectation their wives have picked out in this very store: silk cravats from France, hand-carved walking sticks from darkest Congo, the odd ascot and plum bowtie. But this man, Marvin sees, is not from here. Look at that gray fedora slashing across his brow, brim bent downward to hide his eyes, casting shadows just where shadows need to be, the sophisticated craftsmanship of his solemn pinstripe suit, cut in a Continental, the skin of his authority. Look at that. He is an elevator inspector down from the capitol to kick their hamlet into shape, taking charge, checking for rust.

Marvin stands with the visitor in the empty car. Beyond the shaft the people hustle on their angry ant errands, a legion of impulse and need. Marvin wears the same uniform he has worn for too many years now, a red double-breasted lackey’s getup that radiates threads here and there and strains against his burgeoning belly. Old stains that won’t come out. The defects are not visible in the poor light of the cab, so Huntley Jr. says they’re good enough for now. Marvin turns to the officer and says, “She’s a real beauty, this car. I’ve been working with this baby for over twenty years now and she’s never let me down. Sometimes she catches when we pass three — I think there’s something wrong with the selector. And I have to work to make her flush with the landings sometimes — I keep telling them to have the indicator adjusted, but they’re too stingy to get someone in here.”

“You too,” the inspector says.

“What?”

“Get off. The day I need some nigger to tell me how to do my job is the day I quit. Now get off.”

Marvin Watson vacates his elevator. The elevator inspector slams the door shut behind him, and Marvin hears him struggle with the inside gate. It sticks sometimes. You have to know how to jiggle it. The inspector curses and continues to wrestle with the capricious metal. Marvin considers shouting instructions through the door but thinks better of it. Bobby takes his break about this time. Bobby owes Marvin money and has been ducking him for a while now. Marvin departs for the back stairwell, whistling along to the piped-in music.

* * *

Bright day, sparks erupting off car chrome, the fins on the cars in front of her cutting through bright day. It has rained too long, the city slept in mercury light for too long. Umbrellas stand exhausted behind closed closet doors, their dripped rain puddles dry beneath disdained galoshes. The city air is sweet today.

She is in the city’s car. A few hours ago, before the weary dayshift trudged into work (weary this day especially, following last night’s excess and post-catastatic exhaustion), she intercepted Jimmy’s legs. His legs stuck out from beneath one of the Department sedans. She kicked him lightly and heard his head bang on the undercarriage of the car. He rolled out from beneath the vehicle, his customary Lila Mae smile withering as she told him she needed a car for a few days and that he would have to cover for her. Tough sell in the motor pool this morning. She had never flirted with him before so as not to encourage him and create a situation she had little experience in. But she flirted this morning, cupped his youthful cheek in her bold hand, did not flinch at his rickety teeth (Jimmy has never been to a dentist) or avoid prolonged eye contact. He gave her the key and assured her he would square it with the garage logs. She agreed to be careful with the car, lying to him as usual.

She is not on the clock. She is not working now and is driving aimlessly on the most famous street in the world and is quite pleased with herself. Lila Mae has never taken a day off in her three years with the Department and is discovering that the city is different on weekday afternoons. That there is a secret scofflaw city within the known city, afternoons without a thought in their heads. City workers with orange uniforms repair this street, tending to broken macadam. The potholes have a new meaning this day, do not injure this city car and summon forth reams of paperwork but share with the wheels a secret. A secret that is rough and more intimate for it. She drives and looks at the storefronts, the shopkeepers’ entreaties, but her eyes never stray above street level. Because that is not her job today. She need not concern herself with that different city today.

She stops at a phone booth identical to the dozens she has passed on her drive today. There is no reason she chose this one. She just felt like stopping. The booth is empty, save for a piece of paper lying on the metal sill beneath the phone. Lila Mae takes it into her hand and erases the creases. It is a drawing of a stick figure with a large round head that has no features except for a smile. She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store. She counts to ten slowly and takes ten deep breaths. He answers. Today she finds that ridiculous quiver in his voice sweet. “It’s Lila Mae,” she says.

Chuck starts whispering and she can see him turning away from the Pit to hide the receiver. “Where have you been?” he whines. “Things are going crazy around here.”

“I’ve been around.”

“Everyone’s been asking where you are. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Chuck.”

“This place is a madhouse!” He remembers and lowers his voice again. “Last night at the Follies—”

“I know Chuck. I heard.”

“He’s in the hospital. His leg is broken.”

“He’ll live.” Through the window the sleepy citizens progress up the sidewalk in trances.

“That’s not the point. You don’t understand. The scuttlebutt says it was Lever who sabotaged the elevator, that they were paying Chancre back for Fanny Briggs. A crash for a crash. Wade even suggested that you might have done it.”

“Chuck, I need you to do something.”

He sucks his teeth and is silent for a moment. Then he says, “You should really come into the office. I’ve talked to this guy in IAB who’s covering Fanny Briggs and he wants to hear your side of the story. I think he’ll listen to you. I think if you just talked to him—”

“That’s why I’m calling, Chuck. What did he say about the crash?”

“That it was fishy and that you were probably set up to take the fall. He doesn’t have much to go on. Look, you can tell him you’ve been really sick. Or that you were afraid to come in because of what the papers have been saying. He’ll listen.”

“Chuck, I want you to get close to him. I need to know what else he’s got and what Forensics has to say.”

“Where are you? Is that a fire engine?”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can, Chuck, to see what you have for me. Take care.”

Lila Mae closes the door of the phone booth slowly, bewitched by the different laws of this afternoon. Even the fire engine, just now out of sight, seems rushless and enervated, fighting through an aqueous lethargy. She starts the car. Drives.

The imp found her an hour after Chancre’s mishap. She’d departed the Winthrop Hotel the way she came, through the service entrance after retrieving her suit from the changing room. After blocks of running (a sight: a maid who has witnessed her master’s murder, or murdered her master) she leaned against the glass window of an Automat. Inside the late-night denizens, the midnight refuse, slouched over java and racing forms, tuna on stale rye and their doomed itineraries. No one looked at anyone else in this crumbling sanctuary: that would risk the perfection of their isolation, their one last comfort in this concrete city. She changed back into her suit in the women’s room. She deposited her coins in the coffee machine, in the pastry machine for an arid Danish. She sat at an empty table and read the placard on the metal stand: WE CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR ONLY TEN CENTS A DAY. It was the imp. She laughed. She laughed at Chancre’s fat ass as it lolled in agony on the stage. Laughed at the drunken rallying of her colleagues as they rushed to help their leader, the foolishness of the Intuitionist campaign and Mr. Reed’s Continental affectations. She laughed because Fulton was colored and no one knew and now she had an ally. Her laughter ceased at the thought of Natchez, resolving into a steady grin. The thought of him and their secret.

A groggy Mrs. Gravely (her face smeared with a nighttime beauty cream in a way that reminded Lila Mae of Hambone and Mr. Gizzard) let her into the House and she collected her things. On the dresser, a soft pyramid, was another note from Natchez. Hope you enjoyed yourself, he wrote, and included a phone number. She introduced the note to its older brother in a wallet nook. Lila Mae lit out of Intuitionist House.

Her place was as she left it: raped. She pulled her suitcase from under the bed and packed again, this time for a much longer stay. She did not know when she would be back. After last night, there was no telling when the Shush boys would be back to enforce Chancre’s threat. She lingered in the doorway. She thought she had forgotten something. Hadn’t. She did not possess any lucky rabbit’s feet or childhood dolls to ward off the monsters of the adult world. Just clothes. Then it hit her — she retrieved her copies of Theoretical Elevators. She locked the door. It was only three flights to the street and she felt reasonable again once she stepped into the morning light. She tried to remember when Jimmy reported to work.

The afternoon light is withdrawing from the sky, and the wind rushing through the open window of the city’s green sedan murmurs autumn again. Lila Mae’s eyes stray above street level for the first time today. She parks beneath the sturdy square of the hotel’s sign. She’s a good mile up the Island from her apartment. Deep in the colored city (yet another city in this city, always one more city). The manager looks up from his desk. She says, “I need a room.”

* * *

Little Pompey, that polyp, struts up the avenue with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He stops in a stationery store and purchases what appears to be a foil packet of chewing gum. He counts his change slowly and returns to the street. Past the foamy white light of Harry’s Shave and Haircut, the stammering red and green neon of the Belmont Cafeteria. The office buildings burp their charges out onto the pavement and the scurrying bodies make it difficult to keep Pompey in their line of sight. Natchez asks, “Are you sure it’s him?”

Lila Mae’s eyes dart between the road and Pompey like a metronome. Slowly, to keep her concentration, she tells the man in the passenger seat, “If he didn’t do it, he’s plugged in enough to know who did. Who else would they send? I’m sure they had a good laugh about it. Like we were dogs fighting in a pit.” She thinks, but doesn’t say, look what they did to your uncle. Twisted his mind so that he would deny who he was.

“What if he turns down the next street?” Natchez asks. “It’s one-way.”

“Then you’ll have to follow him on foot until I can get into position on the next avenue. He knows me, but he doesn’t know you.”

Pompey does not turn down the street. He continues north, chewing pink gum.

They have come to an agreement, Lila Mae and Natchez. They will help each other out: Natchez doing what he can to help Lila Mae find out who sabotaged Number Eleven, Lila Mae lending her elevator expertise to Natchez’s quest for his uncle’s black box. She never learned what Mr. Reed’s new leads on the box were since he froze her out of the operation, so they will make do with what information they can get. “Which means the pages from Fulton’s journal,” Natchez offered on the phone, just before she was going to say the same thing. They’ll have to figure out what they can after they obtain copies of the Fulton pages possessed by Reed, Chancre and Lift. The hope is that if they collate the pages, Lila Mae’s facility with Fulton’s thought will force the writings to confess, give up who has the blueprint. And with regard to Lila Mae’s redemption: here they are on stakeout. Trailing their main suspect.

“Tell me about your town,” she says, from nowhere, her eyes still on Pompey.

“Why don’t you tell me about your town?” Natchez responds. “Or leastwise why you moved up here.”

Lila Mae’s small hands tighten on the steering wheel and she wonders again if the news of Fanny Briggs has reached her parents yet, the probability of it making the papers down there. If the other elevator operators in Huntley’s trade in this kind of gossip, and if he has heard that way, the phone in the hallway outside her apartment ringing and her not there to talk to him. She says dully, “You don’t want to hear about that. It’s not very interesting.”

“I do.”

Lila Mae breathes silently through her nose. She eases the sedan past a double-parked ambulance. “I moved up here because here is where the elevators are. The real elevators.” She points up at the jutting structures surrounding the car, the dour edifices. “Midtown is all old growth. Downtown they have high-rises that are a hundred stories tall. And elevators that match them every step of the way.” Conveniently reminded now of something she wanted to ask him. Reroute the conversation. “What made you think of pulling that stunt at the Follies?”

“I wanted to give them a warning, I guess. Of what I’m gonna do to them.” He turns his knees toward her in the seat and leans into the crack between the seat and the door. “I wanted to get back at them. For what they did to my uncle that messed up his head. For what they did to you.” Her eyes keep on the street, she feels his eyes on her. “You didn’t have to leave the House, you know,” he says. “I thought you would have realized I wanted you to take credit for it so you could get back in with Mr. Reed and them.”

“I don’t want to be in their good graces.”

“But they still your bosses, right? Even if they did go to your house. You have to put up with them.”

She shakes her head. Pompey extricates his shoe from a tentacle of newspaper that’s just attacked him. “I just want to clear my name — and for you to get what belongs to you. How did you know what to do to the elevator? To make it fall like that.”

Natchez laughs. “Pretty simple compared to what machines they got up in buildings today. Did you like it?”

“You know I liked it, Natchez.”

He bangs the dashboard with the flat of his hand, smiles wide. “Had to learn a lot about elevators in the last few weeks. More than I want to know. Don’t know how you can do your job like you do, to tell you the truth.”

“They grow on you. Like people. You never know who you’re going to get to like.” Stop right there, Lila Mae. “Then they pop up one day and you like them.” This isn’t characteristic of her at all. “You get to know them and you like them more each time.”

“Like you and me, Lila Mae?” To the nervous twitch of her eyebrows, he says, “That’s okay. You keep driving. When I first saw you I thought you one of them uppity Northern girls. All about what you can do for them and how much do you have in your pocket and all that. But you’re not like—”

“Look,” Lila Mae directs, deflects. “He’s stopping.”

Pompey knocks on the window of a discreet brown door. He glances over his shoulder suspiciously; Lila Mae and Natchez have pulled over on the other side of the street, on the uptown rut of the avenue. She can make out the gold stenciling, crescent-shaped, on the soaped-out window: PAULEY’S SOCIAL CLUB. The door opens and Pompey retreats into the darkness.

“It’s a bar,” Natchez offers. “One of them old speakeasies. Stopping off for a little rye before he goes home.”

“He’s not going home,” she says. Lila Mae looks up at the street sign: Pompey has walked eleven blocks up from the office. Then she sees the car. “See that dark blue car parked outside?” she asks. She knows it, recognizes the blank, bovine face of the driver. “The man inside is Lazy Joe Markham. One of Johnny Shush’s boys. The mob.” The driver stares straight ahead, for now, looking down and beyond the hills and depressions of this busy street, past the downtown buildings, into the black river.

“A mob place? What’s a nigger like that doing at a mob hangout?”

“We’ll see soon enough,” Lila Mae says. “Do you have the camera?”

“Got it right here.”

She’s relieved that Natchez does not start talking again. Not that she does not like what he says, but it is too much for her in this tiny car, and so quickly after so much time. She had entered into a contract with the city similar to the one she has lately arranged with Natchez. An exchange of services. She will keep the city vertical and intact, and the city will leave her alone. And now look at her: she let the city down last Friday, was remiss in her duties, and look at the metropolis’s retribution. It has given her Natchez. When she picked him up, she looked in his face for traces of Fulton’s austere intractability, something to ground him in her world. In the gentle bump of his nose, parabolic symmetry of his ears, she did not see Fulton. He was his own man. Not of her elevator world, but a traveling cable to that place the rest of the citizens live. Through a crack in the buildings’ canopy, she sees a blimp, slug in the sky, primitive and unevolved. The future is in jet fuel speed, jet plane steel. There is no room in the sky for this pathetic bug.

He rouses her: “He’s on the move again.”

Pompey waddles away from Pauley’s Social Club. Lila Mae and Natchez and Joe Markham watch him as he walks uptown in a pale gray Growley Elevator Repair uniform, a toolbox in his right hand. She starts the car.

Pompey has tools.

* * *

At intersections and crowded areas between sedans and trucks the gutter reflected the bitter pastels of metropolitan neon, rainbows hacked down to earth and dirt. Lila Mae followed a trail of cigarette butts. Up one block and around the corner and further still. She was lost. It wasn’t a trail left by a single individual, for one thing, and cigarette butts aren’t as reliable as footprints. They’d been banished to the pavement, dashed there by multitudes of citizens, different brands, some lipstick-smudged or saliva-damp, half smoked, dragged out, crushed under heels or left to smolder to the filter. There was always another a few steps ahead. It might lead to the subway: she needed to get home and couldn’t remember where the subway was. In one respect Lila Mae was correct. The cigarettes did lead to the subway. They led to where anyone had walked. It was her first week on the job.

Later, she realized he saw her coming. Her hands fiddling anxiously in her trouser pockets, tentative footfalls, looking up at the street numbers. An easy mark. She stopped at the corner, confounded. Lila Mae was sure this was where she had emerged from underground this very morning. Chastised herself. This was a ridiculous mistake, not one she allowed herself to make. She’d spent the previous Sunday on her couch decoding the subway map, superimposing its feeble order over the few scattered sections of the city she was already acquainted with. Never mind that she found the entire mechanism distasteful. Shuffling into mole holes: aesthetically weak, not to mention just plain atavistic, this horizontal maundering about. She closed her eyes at the intersection. Lila Mae could see the map sagging over her knees in her apartment, the tangled train routes — but she couldn’t remember the stops. The street numbers. He was there when she opened her eyes, he said, “Nice evening,” his foot on the green chipped lamppost, his hand brushing grit off his white spats. “Nice evening,” he repeated.

She inspected him. Perhaps thirty (an older man), pretending to be a rogue. He wore one of the new slim suits she had observed with increasing frequency since she moved into the city, a vaguely European cut that hung close on his body, sharp along the shoulders thanks to a layer or two of padding. How many of her city paychecks would it take to get one of those numbers? The perfect point of his white silk tie was matched by the opposite-tending arrow of the handkerchief launching from his breast pocket: two halves of a diamond. He had a boy’s face, she reckoned, or a man’s face bulging with boyish mischief, topped by the elegant waves of an obviously well-maintained conk. These are the kind of men they have in the city, Lila Mae told herself, dispatching her daze to the back of her mind. Keep alert. She said, “I’m looking for the subway.”

“Where are you trying to go?” he asked, slapping his foot off the lamppost.

“I’m looking for the uptown train,” she said. The traffic light changed with an audible clunk and the downtown automobiles surged.

She could cross now if she wanted to, right now, cut off this young gentleman before he got any ideas. She looked into his face again. He had wild bristly eyebrows, a nice touch, one deliberate unkempt spot to offset his careful preening. “That’s a few blocks over,” he offered. “I’ll escort you — a beautiful lady like yourself shouldn’t be out by herself at this hour.”

Lila Mae remembered that very line from the movie she had seen not two days ago. At least he likes going to the picture show, she thought. “That’s not necessary,” she said. Waited for the light to change.

“I’d curse myself all night if I didn’t,” he said, and when the light changed and he stretched his arm wide across the avenue, after you, she walked and did not rebuke him as he trotted alongside her. City charm, playing games. He kept talking (even though she did not answer him as she stared ahead to the next corner to see if she could sight the train entrance), informing Lila Mae that he’d just left a business meeting of some sort, and that the meeting had gone well, though he was sad that it had run so late because it was not often he had free time when he came to the city. He enjoyed the sights and the people here. They were characters. He didn’t know anyone, he said, his voice falling a bit theatrically into mock woe, and she smiled at this. Despite her self and her armor. She walked quickly, out of fear, she knew. She didn’t know how to act in situations like this. Last Friday at this time she was packing her few possessions into boxes, under the faint overhead bulb in her janitor’s closet. Lila Mae and her new companion crossed another street. He held out his hand to traffic, stop, even though the stoplight held the automobiles still and idling. Mock gallant. She smiled at this gesture too, though inwardly now: her game face was in place. He said his name was Freeport Jackson and asked her name, although, he added, if she didn’t want to tell him he understood. This was a dangerous city and you never knew. She gave him her name, in the cracked syllables she had already decided, after much practice, would be her work voice, the voice she would present to building representatives as she snapped open the gold badge of her office. He said, “Lila Mae Watson, may I walk you to the subway?” She said he already was. Past an all-night druggist, which surprised her, she’d never encountered such a thing before. But in this city people need things at all hours of the night, she thought. This place will take some getting used to.

Then there it was. The street entrance of her train. Freeport said, “Here we are. At your stop. And mine — my hotel is right here.”

The grease in Freeport’s hair snatched the lights from the Chesterfield Hotel and glistened like a frog’s back. They were just outside the corona of the hotel, the bow of illumination that demarcated the establishment’s domain from the craggy pavement of the metropolis without. Lila Mae said, “You were going my way all along.”

He winked and cocked his fingers into a gun and shot her. “Would you like to have a drink?” Freeport asked. “The hotel bar is something to see,” he said, “if you’ve never seen it.” The ruby carpet, adept at keeping the city’s gray encroachments at bay, climbed up steps to the Chesterfield Hotel’s brass entryway, up to the light within. She’d read about the Chesterfield. Most people had. The President stayed here on his very last visit. They kept a suite open for him, the newspaper said. She didn’t know they let colored people stay here. Behind Lila Mae, that sullen underground gorge, abandoned to the citizens’ abuse, cracked and stained. Freeport said, “It’s the least I can do to repay you for walking me home.”

“I thought you were walking me,” Lila Mae said.

“Exactly,” Freeport said with a smile, his palm open before the carpet. Of course they let colored people stay here. This is North. She looked up at the doorman, past him and through the glass, made a wager with herself — and stopped. She’d never know the outcome, after all, so there was no point in guessing at the make of the elevators. She said, “I’ll have one drink,” and stepped into the light. Disdaining the hole.

He steered her quickly into the cocktail lounge, allowing her only a glimpse of the famous and fabulous lobby of the Chesterfield Hotel, which she had read about. The Maple Room was subdued that Friday night with the quiet murmuring of couples in sophisticated attire, or so it seemed to Lila Mae, who counted the furs and pearl necklaces snug around delicate female necks as Freeport ordered their drinks. The Department had a dress code. She liked her new suit but it was not appropriate here. Not that she had furs or jewelry locked in a box up at her apartment, but still.

“What do you do with yourself when you’re not out looking for the subway?” Freeport asked earnestly. The piano man kept his head down over his keys.

“I’m in the Department,” she answered. “I work for the Department of Elevator Inspectors.” The first time she ever said it. Heavy on her tongue.

“Elevators,” he said, feigning interest in how she spent her daylight hours, but making a good show of it as he attempted to gauge the bulbs beneath those stark lapels of hers, the potential there, continuing to nod his head or stroke his chin as she related that it was her first week on the job and she still didn’t know her way around the office but was getting the hang of it. She had learned, for one thing, that the only ladies’ room was three floors below the Pit, that’s what the inspectors called their rumpus room, the Pit, for reasons that were not yet entirely clear. She was getting her first case on Monday — she’d been riding with a partner all week, an owl-faced grumpus whom she didn’t particularly like, and who didn’t particularly like working with colored people, let alone driving with one. She guessed that some things take a little more time to change, even up here in this city. (Lila Mae did not tell him that Gus Crawford, the senior inspector in question, did not speak to her for their entire tour together. Not a single word, not even to dispatch her from the Department vehicle for a cup of coffee or rebuke her neophyte’s innocent questions, not a word, referring to her only a bit wearily as “the rookie” when asked by the stymied supers and building managers, who, expecting graft as usual, inquired as to who this unexpected third party was. The building representatives left their wallets in their pockets and took their lumps.) But next week she’d get her first case, her first case file. Freeport nodded. He shared his concern that the elevator shaft must be exceedingly dirty and it must be hard to keep one’s clothes clean. She assured him that she didn’t need to enter the well: she could intuit it. She knew he had no idea what she was talking about, but continued anyway, dropping the names of Otis and Fulton, referring to the rival philosophical schools of Empiricism and Intuitionism. He did not trouble her with petty inquiries. He sipped his boilermaker and nodded, urged her to drink up as well, as he’d already gestured for a refill and there she was having barely taken a taste of her Violet Mary. The other colored couple in the hotel bar looked to be African. The woman wore an extravagant liquid red robe, the man a khaki suit with many pockets. They barely talked to each other and drank water.

The new citizens for the new city, the cosmopolitan darlings out on the town, tipped martini glasses and stroked silver cigarette cases engraved with their initials and called the bartender by his name. She had long reckoned on the promise of verticality, its present manifestation and the one heralded by Fulton’s holy verses, but had never given a thought to the citizens. Who the people are who live here. Freeport Jackson calculated the final inch of his cocktail. The dapper men and women traded chatter over gin, white faces pink with alcohol heat in the cheeks, making toasts, discussing escrow. Rich white people, an African couple, Freeport Jackson and his evening’s date. You could never build a building like a martini glass, Lila Mae observed to herself, widening as it got higher like that, it would topple over, foolish. Talk did not travel in that room. Each couple alone with itself. No rowdy groups assembled to celebrate anniversaries or alma mater championship games related over the radio. (She did not tell her companion that she was out tonight so long after the office closed because she had discovered — it was a small office and you could hear the stomach growling of the guy across the room — that the inspectors congregated at a neighborhood bar called O’Connor’s on Friday nights to exchange ribald tales of various elevators and the buildings they lived in, jokes about verticality and its messy effects, to raise a glass to elevators fallen in the line of duty. Didn’t tell her companion that her excitement over this weekly ritual of camaraderie had sent her into the Department elevator at quitting time with the rest of them to depart for said drinking establishment, assuming, in a moment of naive joy over her new circumstances — new apartment, new job, new city — that she was welcome. She walked two yards behind them, their backs to her. Her colleagues did not invite her to sit with them at O’Connor’s defaced tables, did not make any motions for her to join them at the tables, and Lila Mae sat at the bar with the civilian drunks and mumbling-to-themselves Irish nationalists, tasting beer and listening to the elevator brigade’s stories of battles won and lost. No one missed her when she slipped out, abandoning half a beer soon greedily quaffed by one of the keen-eyed drunks, and tried to find the subway home. No one noticed her departure except the bartender, who kept his own counsel.) No rowdies in the Charleston Hotel Bar. Just men and women in negotiations, in smart high-stepping evening wear, careful stitches.

Who the hell is this man anyway. Freeport ordered another drink, Lila Mae demurred; he said, “I sell beauty products. Everybody wants to look good, am I right or am I not right?” He dipped his fingers through the conk waves on his scalp, caressing. “And somebody’s got to give it to them. But you know that already. You’re a salesman yourself. Heck, we both sell the same thing — peace of mind. I’d never try to sell anything to you. You don’t need it, obviously. But most people do. I’ve been in sales seven years now. Seven years — jeez — it still surprises me when I think of it. Up and down the Northeast. I have a good route. I cover the distance. But I’m here now — here in the city — because I just had a meeting with a distributor. The outfit I work for, Miss Blanche Cosmetics, we started small and I’ve been there from the start. We’ve been doing so well we’ve decided to expand and hook up with one of the bigger distributors. We’ve been out there doing the footwork, putting in the long hours, knocking on doors — but a distributor, that’s the big time. I’m the one in charge of getting the deal on paper. Ink. I can’t tell you which company we’re talking to, of course — the walls have ears, you know what I’m saying? — but we’re this close,” demonstrating with his manicured fingers, “this close to having it all in writing. I can feel it. You know how it is, you’re in the elevator and whatnot and you know when it’s right and when it’s not right. Well I think I got it right now. I got it right.”

“What is it exactly you sell?”

“Skin lighteners and hair straighteners mostly. Our clientele is colored, you understand, and the women we cater to want to look good. That’s why I made sure from day one that I was the one who got the city. I drive up with a dozen cases of the stuff in my trunk on a Monday afternoon — you have to catch them when their husbands aren’t home — and by Monday evening I’m sold out. Sold out! Like that. I don’t even do any cold-calling anymore. I got my regulars and they show off for their friends and then their friends want to know where they can get their hands on it. Word of mouth. You don’t see the encyclopedia and vacuum cleaner boys racking those numbers, let me tell you.”

When the waiter informed them that the bar was closing and Freeport asked Lila Mae to join him for a drink in his room, she agreed. Because it had already been decided. She was an inspector. This was an investigation. Freeport extracted a bill from his gold money clip and set her still half-full glass atop it. His eyes shifted about the room, searching for thieves. “You never know with white people around,” he said, chuckling. Said, “And a very good evening to you, dear chap,” to the waiter as they departed the cocktail lounge, him on unsteady feet, her with sure steps. She squinted in the sharp illumination of the lobby after the intimate lighting of the bar. Freeport’s fingers grabbed at her elbow. Lila Mae turned toward the elevator bank — they looked like Uniteds, she thought, from the extra-wide doors — and Freeport said, “You thought — you thought I was staying here? I could never afford this place. No, I’m staying across the street.”

“Of course,” Lila Mae said. As they walked down the steps to the street, the doorman wished them a good evening. Freeport nodded.

He did not lie. His hotel was right there at the subway entrance, but across the street. The night man at the Hotel Belair did not wish the pair a pleasant evening, although the rotund cadaver behind the metal grille did perhaps raise an eyebrow at them. Lila Mae and Freeport received a heartier welcome from the five inmates crouched around the lobby’s radio. They turned their attention from the boxing match and watched the couple disappear up the stairs, the gentlemen’s thin brown bathrobes scarred by cigarette burns and untold greasy-spoon gravies. They watched as the man slipped his palm into the small of the woman’s back and led her from their collective moist-lipped delectation and up the stairs. Three quiet flights up, past racks that at one point fastened fire extinguishers but had been frustrated in their purpose by anonymous miscreants of uncertain intent. Walked past dull walls who declined comment. Lila Mae sniffed the stale air. Freeport whistled. No elevator, she thought. Freeport said, “Hold on a second, my dear,” as he struggled with the lock. It wouldn’t give in to his seductions. “It sticks,” he said, “hold on there.”

She had been in smaller rooms, lived in smaller rooms than this, and in the future would certainly inhabit rooms as suspect. The street noise returned to them after a few minutes’ reprieve, through the open window, marching across the dirty green blinds: honks, catcalls, collisions. The city’s raspberry. She saw the bathroom and its cold tile: Freeport was drying three pairs of exhausted socks on the shower rod. Freeport darted to the table by the lumpy bed and removed the bottle from its brown bag. Crumpled the brown bag and tossed it to the metal basket beneath the single window. “Like a nip?” he asked. “A little nightcap?” he offered, rubbing his handkerchief across a tumbler rim and holding the glass to the light.

She told him she would undress in the bathroom. The door wouldn’t shut for warping or too many ambitious paint jobs, thus allowing a ribbon of white light at the frame through which she could hear his quick fumbling movements out of fabric, the rasping and squeaking of the tiny bed as he mounted it. Lila Mae hung her pants on the shower curtain next to the man’s socks and laid her jacket and shirt and bra over them. She felt the sweat on her feet make the hotel disinfectant on the bathroom floor tacky. She checked her face in the silver glaze of the mirror: Lila Mae had her game face on, that rigid concoction of hers. Holy, it seemed to her, because that’s how she designed it. It accorded with her own definitions.

He said stuff but she ignored it because it did not pertain to the case. She did not concern herself with his breath, corrosive and slow to dissipate, a low foul cloud. She recorded the details of the investigation, his fingers and kisses, his slow tumble on top of her, which was awkward, as if he were a seal and did not possess arms to steady himself. Her first investigation. Lila Mae made a file for her first investigation and recorded the pertinent details. The language of the report was drawn from the lumbering syntax of bureaucracy. It preserved the details but did not retain the other parts, the ones this language did not have words for. He didn’t wake when she dressed and departed, as she knew he wouldn’t.

* * *

A week ago at this time, the night of the accident, she sat in a rocking subway car, returning from O’Connor’s and staring at a newspaper headline. The late edition carried the Fanny Briggs story on the front page. Rosacea squatted on the face of the man who held the paper, making his skin as rough as tabloid paper. His eyes scanned the cheap print. He turned the pages slowly, moving on to other metropolitan catastrophes, the next mithridatic outrage, the pages fluttered behind the front page but the headline remained the same, in the same place hovering across from her. CRASH.

Now things are quite different. The headline is there, bedclothes for bums, dancing on the plume of a midtown wind tunnel. But she is advancing on it, for it contains her name and she is reclaiming her name.

She arrives a half hour early and parks the sedan across the street from Bickford’s shiny windows. When she makes out Chuck’s distinctive walk (an idiot choreography of shoulders and hips, sockets working overtime), she searches the street for signs of his shadow, the silent men who might be following him. Waits another ten minutes after he sits down in one of the window booths (exposed), then enters Bickford’s: he has not been followed by Chancre or Internal Affairs or who knows.

“So what do you have for me, Chuck?” she asks briskly, squeezing into the booth.

“ ‘So what have you got for me?’ ” Chuck complains. “That’s all you have to say for yourself? I haven’t seen you since last week.”

She imagines this the voice he reserves for domestic mishap. Marcy-tone: whining, angry. “I’m sorry, Chuck. There’s a lot going on right now.” She takes the napkin into her lap. The restaurant has recently upgraded to stiff cloth napkins in an attempt to lure some of the theater crowd. Bickford’s is in a weird place: two blocks east from the warehouses, two blocks west of the Big Houses. Bickford’s humble days as a greasy spoon are waning, the nice money is in family fare, snaring the gullible and aimless tourist crowd as they bumble lost. No more haphazard blue-plate specials, no more handwritten signs describing the cook’s daily whim. Better plates, even-tined forks, opaque globes over the fly-specked bulbs. She doesn’t recognize the menu anymore.

“You look good, at least,” Chuck says, a sucker for an apology. “For someone on the lam.”

On the lam: she is that, she thinks. “What’s the mood around the office these days?”

“It’s been pretty hectic since Chancre’s accident. Hardwick’s really been driving us, which isn’t helping things. Chancre’s still in the hospital so it’s got them worried about losing election momentum. It was a real blow to their morale.”

“I saw it made the papers.” And seeing it cheered her. Bad ink goes both ways.

“It was a pretty spectacular fall,” he says. “They were sitting pretty after Fanny Briggs — put the Intuitionists in their place and all that — but with the Otis routine, Lever’s regained some support. Some people are even saying that Reed and Lever were behind it.” It’s not much of a stretch, Lila Mae thinks, to see Reed taking credit for Natchez’s prank. “With that and the Fulton rumors,” Chuck continues, “the election is up in the air again. Have you heard about the Fulton stuff?”

She can’t remember what face she’s supposed to have on. “The rumors about the black box?” If Reed and Lever have leaked to the rank and file that the box is out there, they must be confident that they’ll find it soon. Or perhaps they already have it. She’d know if she were still on the inside. Lila Mae wonders what their response is to her disappearance from the House.

“Right,” Chuck says. “Apparently Lift was supposed to run a story on it this week, but it didn’t appear. There’s all sorts of speculation about that, of course, but the bottom line is that some of us have hope in Lever again, and some of the fence-straddlers are coming around to our side. Do you think it’s true, Lila Mae? That it’s out there?”

“It could be.”

“Just think of it — Fulton’s black box. Do you know what it means? The second elevation is coming. Everything around us, all that out there, will come down. All of it,” animated, looking at Lila Mae for a companion in his romance of the future. She is, to say the least, subdued. Chuck slides his finger into his coffee cup and withdraws a long black hair. “Some of the guys were mumbling that the perfect elevator might put us out of work, but there are always maintenance issues and all that. It should be pretty interesting come Tuesday night. Are you going to vote?”

“I’ll have to see how things are faring. Has Forensics come back yet?”

He shakes his head. “No autopsy yet. You know how they are — they’re so happy to get some work that they got to milk it and keep everybody in suspense. But it looks like they’re going to release their findings on Monday morning.”

Monday morning is perfect for her, is what she thinks. By that time she should have what she needs from Pompey, and that, coupled with the forensics report, should clear her. Forensics is capable of being bought off — they work for the city — but they report to the Mayor’s office, and no matter what else the Mayor and Chancre have cooking, the Mayor knows better than to mix with the elevator inspectors’ election. The election is a family matter, and the inspectors take family matters very seriously. “What about this man Arbergast?” Lila Mae asks. “How’s his case going?”

“That’s the bad part, Lila Mae,” Chuck frowns. “He’s got nothing from what I can tell. Not with you gone. Nobody’s talking. When Forensics comes back with their report — and I think we both know it was sabotage — you’re still the number one suspect. You haven’t been heard from in a week.” His voice squeaking. “After that report comes in, he’s going to have to bring in the cops because it officially becomes a criminal case. And you look guilty, Lila Mae. You look guilty.”

“I was guilty before. Now they just have an excuse to get the rope.”

“Why don’t you come in, Lila Mae,” Chuck says. Almost pleading.

“Let’s not start that again.”

“I can help you. Talk to Arbergast. He’ll help you out. You’re one of us.”

She considers, for a second or two, if they’ve gotten to Chuck. It could be any number of parties. But she has called him because she trusts him, and she needs that trust. She’s ready to accept the consequences. “It’ll all be okay come Monday,” she says, believing it to be true.

“You’re not going to let me in, are you?”

She trusts him: just look at him now. Nobody’s gotten to him. She wishes she could let him in, but there will be time next week to share all she has learned … No. Not all. She knows she’s not going to tell him about Fulton. She can’t. It is in his face now: that faded look, the uninteresting flatness of a background object in a photograph. Their friendship, so real a moment ago, is remote. She’s left him behind. She won’t be telling him anything. “It’ll all be over in a few days, Chuck,” she says. “Then I’ll tell you everything.”

“And the police?” Chuck asks.

She purses her lips, then remembers. “One more thing, Chuck — what do you know about 366 Eighth Avenue?”

“366 …” He presses out his cheek with his tongue, a habit Lila Mae has always found vaguely repulsive. “I know that building,” he says finally. “I saw it on the Board this morning. I think it’s set up for inspection next week. Marberley has it.”

“It’s a new building. No one from the Department has seen it yet?”

“No, it’s a checkup. Marberley wrote it up for some violations a few weeks ago.”

She’s in her car five minutes later, uptown in her room at the Friendly League Residence half an hour later. This is the smallest room yet. Liverpool’s “moving drawing rooms” of the turn of the century, steeped in Victorian largesse, spacious enough for a hundred passengers and decorated with smoked mirrors and yielding cushions, could have fit three of this room inside (an elevator in an elevator, an elevator-passenger). The basement coffers of the Friendly League Residence, unofficial repository of the city’s outcast furniture (rescued from the dump, rescued from burned-out tenements), have outfitted this room with one chair of leprous upholstery and a writing table more than suited for the sober composition of suicide notes. Tall brown cabinet doors hide the Murphy bed, up now, tilted in its hinges and half-stuck after years of wrangling by haggard guests.

She has not seen any of the other guests but can imagine them. The city’s tidal forces wash the weak-treading citizens out here, to the edge, to pitiless crags like the Friendly League Residence. Old men in gray clothes with beards like dead grass, stooped and shuffling. The alibiless. Jagged coughing haunted the halls last night, stealing out of multiple rooms, a sodden death-chorus. It kept her awake, to say the least, manifested in her dreams when they finally came as thunder and wet rain over her childhood home. She couldn’t go outside for the rain, in her dreams. She shook the night off quickly this morning, after finding the sun peeking over the low rows of tenements, which trooped off to the far north of the island, into the black river. Not a lot of elevators in this neighborhood. This is the place verticality indicts, the passed-over flatlands, what might as well still be forest and field. No, Chancre and Lever will not find her here. The other guests’ invisible shuffling-out-of-rooms ended around ten this morning and she waited another hour before venturing out of her box, figuring then it was probably safe. The manager downstairs did not look up from the comics as she pushed aside the front doors and let them slam behind her. He has seen many things.

She spent the afternoon on the city’s turf. In the Hall of Records downtown, on the other edge of the island, right across from the Fanny Briggs building. She walked quickly through the shadow the new building spat across Federal Plaza, eyes away from that structure, quick into the revolving door of the Hall of Records. Lila Mae offered her badge to the clerk, a short old crone who did not even bother to check her identification, so preoccupied was she on stamping, with a gleaming steel device, the seal of the city on a heathen mound of paperwork. Lila Mae could clearly discern, upside down, the holy seal convert that bureaucratic rabble. If the Department had issued a warning out on her badge, it had not reached this office yet. When she was finished with the broad ledgers of the Hall of Records, she went to meet Chuck at Bickford’s, and Fanny Briggs’s long shadow had seeped into the air, indistinguishable from night.

In her room at the Friendly League Residence, she reads Theoretical Elevators, Volume Two. Reads, The race sleeps in this hectic and disordered century. Grim lids that will not open. Anxious retinas flit to and fro beneath them. They are stirred by dreaming. In this dream of uplift, they understand that they are dreaming the contract of the hallowed verticality, and hope to remember the terms on waking. The race never does, and that is our curse. The human race, she thought formerly. Fulton has a fetish for the royal “we” throughout Theoretical Elevators. But now — who’s “we”?

She is teaching herself how to read.

At the pounding on the door, she closes the book (the pages resist each other, so jealous and protective are they of Lila Mae’s touch). She is expecting Natchez, who is to deliver his update on his search for Fulton’s journal pages (and perhaps more). But it is not his knock, nor his low voice heard now croaking, “Amy, Amy baby, I’m sorry,” that last word trailing away, dripping down the door like spittle. “I’m sorry I did it. Open up and I’ll show you. It’s just that sometimes when I get in that place … it’s so low, so low and I can’t see up out of it.” This incident is over. The man slaps the door with his hand, and she can hear him walk down the hallway, slowly, soft clothes, a bathrobe maybe, sliding on the dirty tile behind him, a tail or a broom.

When Natchez’s knock finally rattles the old door, she does not need to confirm through the peephole. She withdraws the chain, opens up and he’s staring off down the hallway with distaste and — she sees Fulton’s profile there, the lightly angled brow, knob chin. He wears a light blue suit of plain cut, the kind of suit she associates with the men of colored town, a church and wake suit, probably the only one he owns. Out of the House servant uniform. He says, turning to her, “Nice hotel you picked, Lila Mae.”

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she says.

Natchez plucks nervously at his lapels. “I didn’t bring much up here. I don’t know why I brought this along,” shrugging, looking up at the yellowed ceiling. He prestos a bunch of flowers from behind his back, a splash of violets. “I saw these on the way. I thought you might be needing something for the room, and it looks like I was right.”

No, she can’t remember the last time someone … has anyone ever? She can’t recall at all. She locks the door behind him and surveys her tiny room. Doesn’t take long. “Thank you,” she says. “You can put them on the sill. I haven’t anything to put them in.”

He places his hat, a dusty black homburg, on the sill next to the swaddled violets. Natchez drags the chair away from the table with a long screech, sits. “You could have done better than this. Even my room’s better than this and I didn’t have no money for a decent place. I mean — I didn’t have any money for a decent room.”

“You don’t have to act any way for me, Natchez.” He’s taken the only chair in the room. She struggles with the Murphy bed and glides it to the floor. “We come from the same place,” she adds, sitting on the atoll lumps of the mattress.

He looks nervous, rubs his palms across his knees. “Did you find anything today? I mean when you went downtown.”

Perhaps he really is a bit nervous, Lila Mae thinks. She has never thought of herself as an imposing person (that’s how little self-perception she has), but he is new to the city and maybe that explains it. “I think I know why Pompey went to that building last night,” she says. 366 Eighth Avenue, where the two of them tailed Pompey after he left Pauley’s Social Club. “The building is owned by Ponticello Food — they own a tomato canning factory across the river. I’m pretty sure it’s a Shush front. I have enough to confront him, anyway. With the pictures we took. Maybe I can get him to admit he sabotaged the Briggs stack.”

“I’ll go with you,” Natchez responds. “What time?”

“I don’t need your help — I mean I can do it myself. I work with him. I know him — inside and out. I can handle it.”

“What time? I’m coming with you.” His hands are folded across his chest.

“You have your own errands to do.” His motives are good, but she is no child. “How did it go at the House today? Did you get it?”

“Man, they didn’t think nothing was up. I waited until Mrs. Gravely went out to do her shopping for dinner. Reed and old Lever were out all day. Took all of five minutes to find his notes. For people who think they pretty smart, you think they would keep that drawer locked — it was right in the drawer where you said it would be.” He pulls out the small black camera from his jacket and shakes it in the air. “Once I recognized his handwriting on it, I took the pictures.”

Lila Mae leans forward, excited. “Can I see them?”

Natchez replaces the camera. “I haven’t taken them to the drugstore to get them developed yet. I was going to wait until I got the ones from the Department and the ones from that elevator magazine.”

“Maybe you should develop what you have,” Lila Mae says, “and use different film for Chancre and Lift. That way you won’t lose everything if something happens.”

His face shrinks a little. The red neon of the liquor store sign across the street flashes on his face, off and on. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll take this down tomorrow.”

Did she sound like a scold? Lila Mae thinks. She was only trying to be practical. “Just in case,” she says in soft tones, “is all I’m saying.”

“No, you’re right. I’ll do that.”

“Are you sure they’re in the Department? They might have taken them somewhere.”

“I’ll find them,” Natchez says. “If they’re there, I’ll find them, and if they’re somewhere else, I’ll find where that place is. You worry about what you got to do and I’ll worry about what I got to do.”

“I’ll tell you what — after I talk to Pompey, I’ll go to Lift and try to find where their copies are. That way, we’ll save time.”

He looks cross, Lila Mae thinks. As cross and defiant as she looked when he insisted on coming to Pompey’s with her? He says, “I’ll do it, Lila Mae. That’s the agreement, right? You got enough to do. When I get the film developed, you can help me figure out what my uncle was saying. Okay?”

She wishes she hadn’t tried to tell him what to do. She has been misinterpreted. “Natchez — do you want to get something to eat?”

He frowns. “I’d really like that,” he says, “but I have to get back on the train. I have a long day tomorrow.” He stands and pushes the chair back to where he found it. “I know you one of these modern city gals, Lila Mae, but me, I like to take it slow. You know? It’s just how I was raised. Let’s — let’s go out tomorrow night for real. After we finish our business let’s go out and do it right. No elevators, no black box, no uncle. Just us. We can go out to dinner and then maybe you can take me out to one of these clubs you go to.” Natchez smiles. “I got all this salary from Mr. Reed and it’s just been burning a hole in my pocket.”

“I’d like that,” Lila Mae says.

In the doorway, he quickly kisses her cheek. “Good night, Lila Mae,” he says. “And keep this door locked if you ain’t going to move to a nicer place.”

The modern city girl locks the door behind him.

* * *

“I know what you did,” she tells Pompey. “I know what you did to the Fanny Briggs stack.”

She has been here since this morning, kneading the rubber grooves of the floormat with her shoes. Lila Mae was surprised to learn that Pompey lived only two blocks from her apartment, but in their history they rarely exchanged beyond terse office communiqués (never have Done with that stapler? and The new Board up? been pronounced with such venom). Just two blocks away from her apartment at the Bertram Arms and it could be a different neighborhood. The life here, the ambient cheer of this easy Saturday afternoon: she associates it with her childhood, Southern skies above the myriad taffy pleasures of colored town. On her street she is anonymous; the Caribbean immigrants share a code, a broad and secret choreography she is excluded from. But these are American colored. As the afternoon unfurls outside her car window, each neighbor greets a neighbor, hats are doffed extravagantly, smiles are currency, no strangers. A toddler strays two steps from her mother and almost falls, virgin knees to the pavement, if not for the sure hand of Mr. So-and-So from up the street, who never leaves the street, who always has a redemptive hand or hard candy or arcane wisdom for the children. The mother thanks him, promises a pie. (All nefaria kept behind apartment walls, saved for inside. The neighbors hear everything but do not interfere, squirreling away every curse and blow as gossip for lean hours.)

The street’s breezy vignettes divert Lila Mae on her stakeout outside Pompey’s tenement. The man in the red hat who leans against a lamppost on the corner, his quick hands. The average time it takes for a shopper to complete transactions at the corner grocery (seven minutes). He does not leave his house. She knows he’s in there because he answered the phone. (She let him hear her breathe.) She spends hours gathering herself: imagines vaulting up the gray stone steps, ringing the buzzer for apartment 3A.

A stickball game erupts out of nowhere, quick as a summer shower, in the time it takes her to glance from Pompey’s stoop to her pocket watch. Ten screaming kids, half a broom, a stained canvas ball. Apparently her car is third base, she discovers when one of the boys slaps her trunk, safe. Startled, she turns in her seat and his round, dizzy face is in the window: “Sorry, lady!” he squeals. Your mama’s so black she, you throw like a girl, nuh-uh he didn’t tag me I got there first.

The stickball game disappears as fast as it came, the boys skid off to some new and suddenly pressing pastime. Lila Mae has decided, now, when the door to 327 opens. Pompey holds the door for a squat, round woman in a bright blue dress and two young boys who swat each other noisily. The Family Pompey. She’d assumed he was married — Pompey has a good city paycheck and is not the type to raise hell of any kind, adulterous or alcoholic or what have you — but hadn’t factored in the kids. They look about five or six, short-limbed kinesis. Mrs. Pompey is in the unfortunate habit of dressing her loins’ issue in the same-colored clothes, just one size apart. Perhaps that is why they beat at each other, slapping each newly undefended quarter on his antagonist’s tiny person. Pompey looks down, scowls and clenches his sons’ shoulders. In unison their heads incline toward his hands, a common response to shoulder pinching, Lila Mae has noticed, instinct ushered in aeons ago by the opposable thumb of some slope-browed hominid patriarch. They stop fighting, stop squirming once their father releases his grip and instructs them to behave. The boys make it down the stoop to the sidewalk without incident as Pompey kisses his wife goodbye on the lips. She hadn’t considered that either, a tender side to Pompey, her prey today. It affects her somehow, she pushes the image aside. She has business with the man.

While his family makes their way around the corner, Pompey sits on the front stoop and withdraws a cigar from his shirt pocket. She allows him two blue drags, then eases out of the Department sedan and climbs the steps before he can notice her approach. She’s standing over him when she interrupts his unknowable petty meditations with a terse “I know what you did.”

“Watson? What are you doing here?” He chokes on the smoke, as surprised by the sight of Inspector Watson at his front door as by the unlikely image of her in a dress. (Her mother made it years before. Large roses float on white fabric, tight on her body without a single unseemly curve. She hasn’t worn it in years, never had occasion to. Never met someone like Natchez, whom she will meet later this evening after they have finished their missions. If she presses her nose to the dress, Lila Mae imagines she can smell her mother’s sweat, deep in the cotton.)

“I know what you did to the Fanny Briggs stack. I know Chancre ordered you to do it,” she says flatly.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, girl.” His face curdles. “Now why don’t, you get away from my stoop before I get on the phone to IAB and tell them that their public enemy number one has finally shown up?” He glances quickly up and down the street to see which of his neighbors is cataloging this incident.

She thinks, he’s probably wondering if he has time to sneak inside his door and slam it behind him. Nope. “Now you listen to me, old man,” leaning over him, “I’m the one in control here now. I saw you go into Shush’s clubhouse and I saw you in your little repairman’s uniform go up to 366 Eighth Avenue. You’ve been cleaning up after Shush’s maintenance gang, making sure they pass inspection so that Shush’s criminal activities don’t attract any undue attention from the Feds.” Pompey leans back beneath this barrage, and Lila Mae leans even closer, tart smoke scoring her nostrils. “I know Shush owns 366—and the shoddy work his boys do on elevators would be just the FBI’s perfect excuse for a raid if he’s not taking care of Department citations.” She drops the pictures of him leaving Pauley’s Social Club, entering and leaving 366 in the Growley Elevator Repair uniform, into his lap. “You’re Chancre’s boy. Now if you don’t give it up on what went down at Fanny Briggs, I’ll be the one calling IAB. And the Feds.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with Fanny Briggs,” he says, head shaking furiously, trying to shake away what he sees in the photographs. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You know what, Pompey? I’m really tired of people telling me lies. I’m through kidding with you people.”

“ ‘You people’? And just what people would that be?”

“You don’t have to shuffle for me, Pompey. I know your game.”

“I didn’t do nothing to Number Eleven. I don’t know what happened. If you want to call IAB or the police, you go ahead and do it. Because I didn’t do anything to Fanny Briggs.”

She pulls back. This man is incredible. “You’d cover for them? You’d go to jail to protect them, after all they’ve done to you?”

He pulls his suspenders off his flesh as if they were chains, lets them snap back. Pompey holds his cigar in front of his eyes and stares at the smoldering red tip. “This is one of Chancre’s cigars,” he says. “Chancre’s. They taste like shit but they got a Spanish label so no one says anything. We all know they taste like shit but we smoke them anyway because he gave them to us.” He looks up at her now. His eyes are cracked with red lines. “I do his work. We all do. Three months ago, the man calls me into his office. I don’t know what he wants. I’ve never spoken to him even though I been there longer than most of those white boys. He asks me if I need money. I tell him, sure — he’s the boss, maybe he’s going to give me that raise I been asking for. He asks me if I heard anything about his friendship with Johnny Shush. ‘Friendship’ he calls it, with his big feet up on the desk like I don’t know what’s going on. Like I’m some dumb nigger. I say yeah, there are rumors, the boys talk about it. Then he asks me again if I need any money and how I could make some looking after Shush’s maintenance crews, because they always do a bad job — none of them seen a machine room in their lives before they became repairmen — and Shush’s got to keep a low profile because of this federal probe. He can’t afford to bribe anyone in the Department, not now. All I got to do is look after the buildings that have been red-coded and make sure they make muster when the Department does the follow-up. If Shush’s boys have messed up, which they usually do, I clean it up because I know what the Department is going to be looking for. I needed the money, so I took the job. Been three months I been doing it. Chancre says just three more months and things will have cooled down. So I did it.”

“It’s against the law,” Lila Mae barks. “You took an oath.”

“Don’t talk to me about oath,” he spits. “I got two boys. One five, the other seven. I was raised in this neighborhood. It’s changed. You’ve been watching me all day, I figure. You see them kids play ball? Ten years from now half of them be in jail, or dead, and the other half working as slaves just to keep a roof over they heads. Ten years from now they won’t even be kids playing ball on the street. Won’t be safe enough even to do that. Walk down this street, you can smell the kids smoking that reefer. Right out in the open like they got no shame. You see that young man on the corner in that red hat? He sells it to them. A few years from now, it won’t be reefer he selling but some other poison. My kids won’t be here when that happens. I need money to take them out of here.”

“Why should I believe you, Pompey?” she demands. “You’ve been just as bad as the rest of them ever since I joined the Department. Worse. Laughing at me with them. Most times you laugh harder. If you didn’t do it, then who did Chancre send in?”

“I don’t know anything about it!” He almost stands up, but catches himself and settles for deep glowering. “And you, how am I supposed to act, the way you carry yourself. Like you some queen. Your nose up in the air? I got two kids.”

“Yeah, I heard you. You got two kids. And you shuffle for those white people like a slave.”

“What I done, I done because I had no other choice. This is a white man’s world. They make the rules. You come along, strutting like you own the place. Like they don’t own you. But they do. If not Chancre, then Lever. I was the first one in the Department. I was the first colored elevator inspector in history. In history! And you will never, ever know what hell they put me through. You think you have it bad? You have no idea. And it was because I did it first that you’re here now. All my life I wanted to be an elevator inspector. That’s all I wanted to be. And I got it. I was the first colored man to get a Department badge. They made shit of what I wanted and made me eat it. You had it easy, snot-nose kid that you are, because of me. Because of what I did for you.

“Come up here and piss in my face. I don’t know what you’re looking for, Inspector Watson, but I don’t have it. It’s not here. You have to go someplace else to find it, and that’s your bad news. I remember when this was a mixed block. Had that polack deli on the corner. Now it’s closed down.” He returns his gaze to her. He taps the light ash from his cigar and takes a deep drag. “You can tell them about me. Call the cops or IAB, whatever you want. I’m gonna be here on this stoop until I finish this here cigar I got. And I’m gonna go to work on Monday like I always do and see what happens. Lila Mae Watson or no Lila Mae Watson.”

When she wrenches the car away from the curb, he’s still in the same position. Staring up at the tenement across the street, hands resting on his knees. A thin old gentleman with a wooden cane, on his interminable progress up the street, stops to wave at him, and Pompey returns the greeting. The photographs lie at his feet. Flakes of ash from Chancre’s cigar hitch a ride off the wind, pirouette up and away.

* * *

ST. ROLAND THE CARPENTER, b. Taranto 1179; d. near Naples, 1235. One of the primary sources for Roland the Carpenter’s life is his letters and drawings of fantastic contraptions, of which many were preserved until they were destroyed in a fire in 1873; they give a picture of the man and the conditions in which he worked so unassumingly and selflessly. He was ordained a priest among the parochial clergy at Bologne. He made aborted attempts to become a missionary among the Moslems. This desire had some fulfillment in 1219 when he accompanied the crusaders of Gautier de Brienne to Egypt; he made appeal in person to Sultan Malek al-Kamel, but had no success with either Saracens or crusaders, and after visiting the Holy Land he returned to Italy.

In 1225, while praying in the church of San Febronia, he seemed to hear an image of the Virgin Mary say to him: “Lift the people to His Kingdom.” He took the words literally and developed the belief that churches should have two floors, the bottommost for sacrifices and alms-giving, and the uppermost reserved for prayer. The next year he founded the Order of the Gradual Stair but had little success in finding converts. In search for sinners he penetrated the prisons, the brothels, the galleys, and continued his mission into hamlets, back lands and at street corners. He converted none save one spectacular penitent, a Spanish woman who had murdered her father in a gambling dispute and then disguised herself as a man and served in the French army. It is said he once rescued a family of chickens from a burning barn. A saying of his that has rarely been repeated since is: “Let us take one leg up, and He will carry us the rest of the way.” In 1235, he fell afoul of the local governor for aggressive proselytizing and it was decreed that he should be put to death by a battering of cudgels. His wounds were healed after every blow, whereupon he was burned at the stake. At his funeral all the poor of Naples surrounded the coffin that contained his heart, which had been recovered from the ashes; the peasants had mistaken his procession for that of another holy man who had died the very same night. His emblem in art is three stairs. He is the patron saint of elevator inspectors.

* * *

Such modesty, she thinks. No one wants to take credit for such a handy piece of sabotage. She believes Pompey, and his story jibes with Chancre’s. (She’s a good mile away from her destination, she drives slowly, no rush, only half her mind on the angry vectors of city traffic.) If they didn’t do it, she muses, then who did — because if no one is responsible then she was negligent. And she is never wrong. Considers: Chancre had no reason to lie. If he was brazen enough to have her kidnapped, to make plain his alliance with Johnny Shush, there is no reason not to admit tinkering with Number Eleven. (Number Eleven, the forgotten victim in this drama, a cab so full of promise, taken from us at such an early age, in the prime of life. Who cries for Number Eleven? So preoccupied is she with how the accident impacts her that Lila Mae never gives a thought to the bereaved, the sobbing assembly line who has lost one dear, who never had a chance to say goodbye.) Pompey. She was so sure about Pompey, that shuffling embarrassment. She files her botched interrogation away. She has an engagement to keep. Lila Mae notices a long black hair lying like a snake on her dress. Drops it out the window.

Pompey is a small man on a dirty stoop in an endless city. She files it away for later. She has a date, and an errand to run before that date. The modern city girl has chosen a restaurant she remembers Chuck describing to her once, a Tiki joint with (reportedly) Hawaiian grass hanging from bamboo fixtures, and lights covered by multicolored globes. They have dancing after midnight, and Lila Mae hopes that this will fulfill Natchez’s expectations of her social life, despite the fact it has been cribbed entire from Chuck’s adventurous forays into the city he has made his new home. She catches her eyes in the sinister rectangle of the rearview mirror: tiny and cold, ancient black meteorites peering out of dirt. She could have been nicer to Natchez last night — after so many poses, couldn’t amiability be a guise as well, removed from the closet hook when necessary? Natchez is new to the city and she remembers her first slow steps on this concrete, looking up at the scuffed knees of the structures girding above her. (The very same buildings that at this moment accelerate sunset. City night precedes real night thanks to these grim monoliths, the merciless fortification they have erected against nature.) Lila Mae thinks, she should be to him what she never had when she arrived here. Simple kindness, a helping hand — so before they meet for dinner she will infiltrate Lift and find Ben Urich’s pages of Fulton’s journal. Red stoplights warn. She stops at the intersection, thinks, she will do what she can to make his mission easier, the discovery of his birthright.

At the corner to her right is a building condemned. Small and understated red signs announce its demolition, cheap plywood in a perimeter to keep the citizens away from the damned edifice. There is time to think, as the green light germinates, what need shaped this being, now husk. Its desiccated skin has been sooted by decades of automotive bile. Hard to see beneath it. Warehouse, office building, sweatshop. Obsolete and doomed, soon to be replaced by one of those new steel and glass numbers. Chuck is right, she thinks. She hadn’t considered all the implications of the second elevation. They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew. What will it look like. The shining city will possess untold arms and a thousand eyes, mutability itself, constructed of yet-unconjured plastics. It will float, fly, fall, have no need of steel armature, have a liquid spine, no spine at all. Astronomer-architects will lay out the heliopolis so that it charts the progress of the stars through heaven. The demolition man’s hand is on the detonator. Scarred around the knuckles by forgotten cigarettes. All the people are gone. Deliberates: a cigarette before or after? After the explosion the sky will fill with dust. Decides: now.

When Natchez and Lila Mae find his black box.

Honking behind her. It is time to move away from the dying spot, leave the animal to die in peace. On to more practical matters. What will Lift favor, she wonders, these guardians of the elevator industry? Rustic Grummans with their filigreed cabs, quaint molding encoding the history of the sacred machine, or antiseptic Arbo Executives, sheer and spartan, born of the exigencies of speed, jet plane elevators? She picks the latter, and will find she is right when she gets past the Lift night watchman, Billy, who is distracted now by the final leg of his college correspondence course, specifically his latest assignment, a five-page paper on courtship and Victorian mores.

She parks, looks at her watch. It is seven-thirty on a Saturday evening. The citizens plan their weekend rites of expiation. Lift is a monthly and their latest issue has just hit the newsstands; she hopes there will be no one upstairs. Most of the windows are dark on the silent floors above her: as she looks up, the face of the Lift building is a plank extended over the starboard side, over a sea thick with sharks. Pushes open the doors.

The night watchman sits behind a gray curvilinear desk. Sweat beads on his wide forehead and the brown hair above his craggy face is damp. Furious concentration. He seems out of breath from his mental strain, definitely out of shape physically: the buttons of his dark blue uniform allude to an ongoing border dispute with his soft belly. In his hands is a dime paperback his eyes do not stray from. On its cover a young chimney sweep digs in his pocket for pence. She says, “Lila Mae Watson. I’m here to inspect your elevators.”

Billy holds his paperback in the air and asks, “What’s ‘paraffin’?”

“A waxy substance used in candles. Mostly. Do you want to see my badge?”

Still distressed over the paraffin dilemma, Billy says, “Isn’t it a little late?”

“Night shift. Neither rain nor sleet. Wherever there’s an elevator in trouble, we’re there.” She holds her badge closer to his face. “That better?”

“I need glasses, to tell you the truth. Reading glasses, anyway.” He frowns at his book and waves her on. She picks out Lift’s name from the white letters in the occupants’ registry next to the elevator: eighth floor. She tries to imagine what his expression will be when she tells him she has the Lift pages. Natchez wished to accompany her on her visit to Pompey’s, told her to stay out of this sneaking around out of protective impulse. She wants to see his eyes when she slides the film across the dinner table, past the miniature Hawaiian god, which glows in solemn power from its proximity to the candle. It arrives, an Arbo Executive all right, trim and lucent.

It seems, she notes, to be operating at optimum performance levels.

On the eighth floor the Executive’s sleek door recedes and she sees the Lift logo levitating on glass. The outer room is lit by three ceiling lights set above a wide and solid desk, presumably where the receptionist sits in workday hours, filing her nails with a rustless implement (that fine white dust floating in the air, nudged by ventilation grates). She pushes open the glass doors: she does not hear a sound.

Lila Mae creeps to the white stucco wall separating reception from the long newsroom beyond and peeks behind it, scanning quickly. There is no one to see her. Like sneaking a glass of water. Twenty or so desks lined up to the (north, she notes) wall, islands inhabited by paper fauna, and not an inquisitive critter in sight. All the typewriters sleep, clacking ceased. Mum’s the word. Over one desk, a good two thirds into the room, a small desk lamp with an emerald glass shade adumbrates a busy desk and a vacant chair. Was the light left on accidentally or is someone here? The building, walls and floor, hums. Then she sees eyes watching her out of the darkness, from the west wall, and she retreats behind the receptionist’s bulwark. She stares without interest at a ball of red paper in the secretary’s wastepaper basket. It looks like a valentine but it is not the season for valentines. She does not hear anything behind the partition. Her left hand traces a ridge in the stucco; invisible scar beneath her fingers, an old wound with a tale behind it, no doubt, but there’s no one to tell her and it will not speak for itself. The elevator shaft is waiting a few steps away, just behind the office doors, and elevator potentiality waiting for her summons. But she doesn’t hear a sound, and after the thought of relating to Natchez her botched mission repulses her, she peeks again behind the wall, her eyes have adjusted to the murk, and sees that what she took for eyes is a trophy. An Otis, to be exact, honoring vertical excellence. Two gold call buttons float in quartz, spaced apart according to the industry standard. The trophy rests on its side atop the listless dais of a black file cabinet. Some reporter’s coveted Otis, the surety of cheap grandeur: an exposé on graft, a report on shoddy and hazardous suspension gear in a faraway kingdom’s shafts. No, there’s no one in the newsroom except the damned industry. She is alone with an unattended desk light whose electricity is an expenditure waiting to be itemized and eliminated in the next budget of Lift magazine, Covering the Elevator Industry for Thirty Years.

She trips through the magazine’s masthead, which is corporealized now as a series of black nameplates on the reporters’ desks. She recognizes some of the names from articles. They are the chroniclers of her mission: the bards compose their tales here, on these typewriters, versifying the inspector’s glum adventures into darkened shaft. She searches for Ben Urich’s name on the desks — she remembers Mr. Reed identifying Urich as the author of the squashed article. She has never liked his articles, which seem unduly obsessed with the dingier aspects of her enterprise, fixate on the backroom deals and betrayals she has done her best to stay out of during her Department tenure. (And here she is on tiptoe now, a center stage in that intrigue.) If his desk does not contain Fulton’s notes, she will move on to the editors’ offices. Travel up the masthead to those tiny specks at the top. The ones who know.

There. His desk is clean and organized, a standout from his fellow scribes’ tabletop anarchy. Lila Mae digs into her purse (another neglected artifact from her closet dusted off tonight) and finds the miniature camera. Cups it in her hand as if it were a beautiful black frog she discovered in a creek. Lila Mae bought the camera this morning with sixty dollars she discovered in the breast pocket of her Friday suit. She’d forgotten about the miscalculated bribe — so much since then — but was glad she got to put it to good use. And her hand is on the first drawer when Ben Urich says, “You must be Lila Mae Watson.” Which, needless to say, disturbs her plan.

* * *

Big Billy Porter laughs and raises a mug to his comrade’s escapade. “You think that’s gross, Ned my good man, let me tell you about the first time I ever saw the bastards. My first month out — this is Before the Code, I’ll have you know, and the Department didn’t even have the motor pool yet. We had to take the bus or the subway — they send us out in the morning with a pocket full of change and three index cards with our cases on them. Had to find our own way around, mates, and it was a damned mess. One thing after the other. So it’s my first month out, right, and I have to inspect the old Jenkins Textile Factory downtown. I know it has to be one of those early Otis machines, you hear me, from how old the building is, but I don’t know how old. Jenkins, Jenkins Junior, I don’t know who the guy is, but he greets me on the loading dock. Like he’s been waiting for me a long time, like I don’t have anything better to do than check out that ancient rig he’s got up there, right? You know the type, boys. So he says to me, ‘We’re having a little problem with the freight elevator,’ timid like a schoolteacher. Like I don’t know that. Anyway, he drags me inside and we go up to the machine room and I’m telling you boys, you have never seen anything like this. For one thing there were no windows and you knew no one had been inside there for years. Mouse droppings all on the floor, spiderwebs hanging from the ceiling. And the dust! I thought I was going to choke to death. Anyway, I see the cables coming out of this big wood contraption, looks like a big crate. But no motor. So I ask the little guy what the hell that is and he’s talking through his handkerchief ’cause of the dust and he tells me his dad didn’t like the sound the motor made, so he had them cover it up so it wouldn’t make as much noise. And I’m thinking to myself, it was just a few years ago that United made all that money for coming up with the same innovation and here the damned owner of a rag factory has done it long before. You get patents for something like that and here it is locked up in this dump downtown. I don’t tell him that, but that’s what I’m thinking. So I tell him I’m sorry about his dad’s delicate sensibilities and all that but I’m gonna have to take a look inside it. Junior hands me an iron pipe that’s laying in the dust and I start having at the box. I’m straining and I’m trying to find a purchase point and then suddenly it gives — and they all come streaming out it, thousands of the little black bastards. And I know what you’re thinking — oh, yeah, Billy, what are you whining about, we’ve all hit a roach bomb before. But you have never seen anything like this, fellows. Thousands and thousands of them, they’re running up the bar to my hands, they’re running across the floor like water out a fountain. I jump back and I look down and they’re all up my pants and I can feel them underneath my clothes, on my skin. The other guy is screaming — he backed up against a crate and slipped, and they were all over him. Screaming like the devil. Well, I was screaming too, if you want to know the truth. They must have been breeding in there for decades, eating that old Otis wiring and having just a high old cockroach time. We didn’t know they liked to eat elevators back then — there were stories, of course, but the Department study was still years away. I almost shit my pants. I ran out that room, shut the door behind me and got the hell out of there. Hours later I still had roaches crawling out of my pockets. I don’t know what happened to Junior. Maybe the little black bastards ate him.”

* * *

She tugs the metal beads dangling from the light shade. He sits on the edge of the desk, ass a paperweight. The right sleeve of his powder-blue seersucker is rolled up in an unruly bunch to the elbow, where his arm transforms into an odd white appendage that ends in tiny pink fingertips. A stained cast. His face is slack and exhausted, dusted with tiny gray scrub-hairs. She says, “You know who I am.”

“I figured you would come sooner or later,” he tells her. “Once I got the other parts of his journal. You haven’t been to the office so you must be up to something. Your file says you’re one sharp cookie — I figured you’d be coming around. Do the same thing I would do in your position.”

Even with his injury, Ben Urich attempts a pose of metropolitan bachelorhood. His left index finger hooks into the cuff of his pants, easy baby, just passing the time. “You look confused,” he says. “I have been too, over the last few days, to be perfectly honest. Ever since I finished the article on the black box.”

“Which never came out.” She replaces the camera in her purse and zips it shut.

“My editor was convinced that we shouldn’t run it.” He raises the white club that is his right hand. “And I was soon persuaded that his decision was right. Or, attempts were made to persuade me.”

“Johnny Shush,” she offers.

“How much of his journals have you seen?”

“None yet. I was just about to take my first look.”

“Yeah, like I said, I figured you’d be around soon. You or someone else. They’re in the bottom drawer. Beneath last year’s pinups.”

The drawer slides and shudders. Bangs loud in the deserted newsroom. Lila Mae lifts two calendar pages featuring two famous picture-show starlets in erotic repose, finds the goods beneath them, split in shadow. “You can take them out,” Ben Urich tells her at her hesitation. She recognizes the cramped handwriting, the internecine, slashing script. She has studied it under the gaze of the Institute librarian, in locked rooms — she even, in the early, giddy days of her conversion, practiced Fulton’s handwriting for hours. Knows the ink. For one entire semester Lila Mae wrote her class notes in that hand, believing it would bring her closer to him. As if the mechanics of delivering the idea to the physical world were half the process. She mastered his hand, its reticent parabolas and botched vowels. Here it is now, on the familiar notebook paper Fulton preferred. She tracked down the manufacturer once; they have a plant across the river where they still turn out the Fontaine line. The teeth along the inside edge complete the tableau: they have been torn out of his notebooks.

Says to herself, “It’s his.” She could be in the Institute stacks, she could be in her old room above the gymnasium, in her converted janitor’s closet. It is that real. She decodes that scratch, tumbles down its slopes and sudden cliffs, halfway down the page past a series of glyphs she doesn’t recognize: Anymore tests at this point would be redundant. It works, and all that is left is to deliver to the cities. It works.

“Is it what you wanted?” Ben Urich drawls.

“It is it exactly.” She doesn’t lift her eyes from the pages. “Who sent them out?”

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be talking. If you knew, you wouldn’t be here,” rubbing his good hand over the dirty cast, “so I guess I’ll have to scratch you off the list.”

She barely hears him. The cream-colored paper is in her hand. She could memorize it and transcribe it later. Place her recreations next to Natchez’s photographs and see where they lead. She’ll present her copy at the dinner table and slide it to him. Her present. Still looking down … it required principles — a way of thinking — I thought I had abandoned. She repeats the phrase to herself, making it indelible. As cover she asks, “How did you know I was coming?”

“It was written, you might say. Like my fingers. I assume from the reports that you’ve been staying at Intuitionist House. That you’re working with Reed and Lever to make sure Chancre and his masters don’t get it first.…” He trails off. “Which means that the Intuitionists don’t have it yet.”

“I left the House.” I have walked away from it, only to return and find that it has not changed. It works.

“Didn’t like the food?”

“Didn’t like the conversation.”

“Then you’ve found a different partner. I thought for a minute that you might be Arbo’s way of telling me they’re still watching me.”

What he said: Chancre’s masters. Finally, after too long pondering the minutiae, she looks up from Fulton’s notes. “Arbo? What do they have to do with this?”

His eyebrows jumping. “I thought you were smart. A hundred-percent accuracy rate.” The highest in the Department, Lila Mae adds to herself, not that anyone would ever mention that. “Until Fanny Briggs anyway. Who do you think really needs the black box?”

She stares at him, the pages in her small hand bending to the floor.

“I can see you’re genuinely taken aback,” Ben Urich says. He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a shiny dime. “Arbo and United — they’re the real players here. I see I’ve upset you. Why don’t you have a seat?” She sits down slowly in Ben Urich’s seat, where he muckrakes, where he exposes. Through the windows in the north wall, she sees the dark windows of the offices across the street. No one there.

“This is a real surprise,” Ben Urich says. “You’re the key, after all.” He flips the dime in the air, as is his habit, but he’s not used to his left hand yet. He misses the silver on its descent and it rolls away into the darkness.

“What are you trying to tell me, Urich. What the hell are you trying to tell me?”

She’s talking to his back. He’s on his knees trying to retrieve his dime. “Who else needs the black box more than United and Arbo,” he asks a ball of dust, “the biggest elevator manufacturing concerns in the country? The world. Arbo broke my hand to make me back off the story, for Pete’s sake.”

“Arbo. Arbo’s dwindling markets.”

“They’re in bad shape, that’s for sure. Overseas sales down forty-five percent, domestic thirty. Ever since their Jupiter line never took off and United came back swinging. Got it!” he says, returning to his desk. “Christ, you want some water or something?”

“Ever since United got Chancre to endorse their line,” Lila Mae considers. Her voice is faint, as distant as the quiet rotors in the machine room above her.

“Of course,” Ben Urich confirms. “Every major elevator market in the world looks to this city’s Department for guidance. This is the most famous city in the world. The Big Skyscraper. I don’t have to tell you that the whole world, every contractor and two-bit real estate tycoon, comes here first. This city.”

Remembers Reed, that first day in Intuitionist House, telling her that Lever was out of town talking to the good people at Arbo, that’s why the candidate could not meet her. “Arbo,” she says, “is bankrolling their campaign.” Whoever owns the elevator owns the new cities.

“I should hope so. It’s not like the Intuitionists are rolling in dough. Those dues don’t add up to much after you deduct all those wine and cheese symposia. Shoot, you only have that House because crazy old Dipth-Watney was feeling generous to the underdog. Arbo owned the Department when Holt was Guild Chair, and it was United’s money that won the Chair for Chancre. You know that story about Holt and the chorus girl? — she was one of United’s Safety Girls. Did you think this was all about philosophy? Who’s the better man — Intuitionism or Empiricism? No one really gives a crap about that. Arbo and United are the guys who make the things. That’s what really matters. The whole world wants to get vertical, and they’re the guys that get them there. If you pay the fare.”

He’s missed the dime again. This time it bounces and jets off to the left of the desk. He crouches again, asks, “Who do you think was behind your accident last week? United. Chancre might have done the dirty work, but only at United’s direction. Those are Arbo elevators in the building. Then there was that incident at the Follies, when Chancre fell on his ass. Had to be Arbo dealing out payback for Fanny Briggs.”

“It wasn’t them.”

“Then who was it? The ghost of Elisha Graves Otis?”

He doesn’t know everything. “You said Arbo broke your fingers,” Lila Mae says. “Why would they try to stop your article from coming out? If they’re backing the Intuitionists — and Fulton’s box is most assuredly an Intuitionist creation — then why wouldn’t they want the truth to come out? It doesn’t make sense. The Guild hears about it, they vote for Lever, and Arbo has their man.”

“They’ve won the hearts and minds?”

“They’ve won the hearts and minds, yes.”

Still looking on the floor. “You want to give me a hand here?”

She ignores him.

“Let me ask this, Miss Watson: who has the blueprint?”

“I don’t know.”

“If they don’t have it, they don’t control it. Suppose it’s not Intuitionism-based. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it’s Empirical. Or it’s Intuitionist but Chancre finds it first with his Shush and United muscle and keeps it under wraps. Destroys it. Where does that leave Arbo?

“I’ll tell you where,” he says, “with their peckers swinging in the wind. Pardon my French. My article announces to the community that the Intuitionist black box is coming and that it’ll be found soon. Build up the hopes of the inspector electorate, that bunch of bitter bastards, and then it doesn’t show up. They’ll show their displeasure on Tuesday, in the polling booths. Here it is,” he says, standing again. To the dime, as he returns to the light: “Trying to hide from me, little buddy?”

“They have to do what they can to keep your story under wraps until they have it.”

“Otherwise they’re screwed. Chancre can spin it any way he wants. Even from his hospital bed. The rumor escaped anyway. ‘Another Intuitionist hoax.’ My sources tell me he’s already got a press conference scheduled for Monday. ‘If my opponents have the black box, let them show it to us.’ Put up or shut up.”

“Where is it?”

“Exactly.”

“Your hand.”

“They nabbed me right outside the office,” Ben Urich says, wincing for a moment in recollection. “I put up a fight, I did my darndest but the next thing I knew they had me in the back of a car. They started to break my fingers one by one. It was two guys, two blockheads. Trying to come off like mob guys, but I knew they weren’t mob. Could tell by the shirts. They were corporate boys, wore the downtown uniform right down to their cotton oxford shirts. Mob guys, Shush’s boys, they got their own style. Buy the same expensive suits their bosses wear, with the same tacky lapels, and their shirts are cheap blended fabrics. Get them all from the same store — Finelli’s on Mulberry.”

“They broke your fingers.”

The pink fingertips at the end of the cast wiggle. “Last Saturday. They got me right outside this office and got tough, telling me to lay off the story or else. Messed up my hand — my writing hand, mind you — and dropped me off at my apartment like I was their prom date. To send me a message. But then I remembered the shirts and started doing some legwork.”

“You found out they were Arbo.” Of course, of course.

“I got out some old surveillance photos I took a few years back. When they started selling their new undercarriage brakes to overseas firms, bumpkins who didn’t know that they hadn’t been approved in the States yet.” He places the dime on the desk and rummages through another drawer. “The pictures are here somewhere,” he says. “Here they are.” He flips through a stack of glossies. “I found the men pretty quickly. That’s them leaving the office with the rest of Arbo’s muscle. Right there.”

She is afraid to look. It is a grainy black and white photograph capturing one minuscule segment of city. Five solid men stand around a dark sedan. She angles the photo beneath the lamp, sees her hands are shaking and commands them still. “Jim and John,” she says.

“You know them?”

“They were in my apartment last Friday. Searching it.”

“Makes sense, considering what’s in the Fulton pages our anonymous mailer sent to them.” He juggles the dime in his good hand, gathering his courage for another go at his favorite pastime. “Jim Corrigan and John Murphy. On the Arbo personnel files, they’re listed as ‘consultants,’ but the police have jackets on them. Breaking and entering, aggravated assault, industrial espionage, what have you. United has Shush’s boys and Arbo has these guys. Jim’s even got a murder charge under his belt, but Arbo’s lawyers got him off. You remember the LaBianco case a few years back?”

“Who’s this?” She taps the photo. Her hands do not shake.

“That’s Raymond Coombs. Another ‘consultant.’ Mostly does strongarm work for them because he’s a big colored guy and intimidating. Wait a minute — I think I have a better shot of him.” He shuffles through the photos. It is a head shot. The man’s eyes look off to the left, soft and lost. “You know him?” Ben Urich asks.

“He told me his name was Natchez.”

“Wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley, from what I’ve read. One tough customer. Guess he’d have to be — a colored man working in a white outfit. Like you, I guess.” The dime is in his hand, inviting, taunting. “But I don’t know why I have to tell you all this. With what you appear to know, I would think this old news.”

She can’t think. Asks Natchez’s photograph a question.

“Because your name is in his notebooks. You’re the link.”

“I don’t …”

“Look back in the drawer. From my photos of the Fulton pages sent to Arbo.”

Underneath the pinup calendar are more photographs. She holds them under the lamp. Her head hurts.

Ben Urich decides to go for it: tosses the dime into the air. “Wasn’t easy getting these, let me tell you. It’s on that page, in the margin,” he says. His hand darts. It snatches the dime.

She sees her name.

“Heads,” Ben Urich says.

Lila Mae Watson is the one.

“Now maybe you can tell me what that means,” Ben Urich says.

“Hey, can we get in on this?” John Murphy asks. “Or do we need, like, an engraved invitation?” Jim and John stand behind them, just a dime’s throw away. Jim leers at them, John has his hands on his hips as if mildly vexed. He says, “Because we’ve come a long way and it would be downright rude for you to turn us away.”

She runs. Jim lunges for Ben Urich, who has been jerked out of his suave recline. As he falls back on the desk, he aims one foot at the back of his chair and launches it, skidding on its wheels, at the legs of John, who stumbles in his pursuit of Lila Mae and smashes his head into the corner of a desk. Which leaves Ben Urich pinioned on his desk with Jim’s fingers on his neck. Ben Urich takes his lumps. Ben Urich always takes his lumps.

The elevator’s door opens, conjured from tranquil quiescence, the vehicular ether, by Lila Mae. She slams her palm against the Lobby button (black mottled with gray, sure and firm plastic, Arbo Floor Button, Motley Black, City Series #1102), sees John emerge, rubbing his head, from around the partition, she reaches for the Door Close button (initiating a signal to the selector in the machine room a hundred feet above through the amiable copper of the traveling cable inside the Arbo Router, City Series #1102) and leans against the dorsal wall of the Arbo Executive. John does not pick up the pace. He sees the black rubber lip of the elevator door start its progress across the entrance of the cab. He nods at Lila Mae and pivots towards the fire doors.

* * *

It is not difficult to outrun an elevator if the competition is only a few floors. The elevator moves deliberately through the shaft at a speed approved, after tense summit hours, by both the Department of Elevator Inspectors and the American Association of Elevator Manufacturers. The box is safe, but the box must also feel safe when the passengers observe the doors slide shut and they dematerialize into the nether space of the shaft. As they lose their world and gain another. But Lila Mae does not see her pursuer when she runs out into the bright fluorescence of the ground floor. It is not difficult to outrun an elevator, but a recent head injury can make it difficult, particularly when careering down from cockeyed landing to cockeyed landing.

Lila Mae jumps over the legs of Billy the night watchman, who is out cold on the clean white tile, a navy-blue porpoise. She gains the street. Behind her, she hears the stairway doors slam open. On the other side of the street is the Department sedan. She would have time to get in the car — the keys are in her hand right now, cool and solid — but the automobile is boxed in by a large van, out of which hunched colored men ferry clean tablecloths into the service entrance of Ming’s Oriental. Instinctively she jets right, and makes it a few steps before she realizes that left is where the populated avenues are, the theater crowds and cops. But she’s already committed. Calculates her lead on John: not much. She jumps right, into a doorway that opens up to steps. Wants to get out of plain sight before he reaches the street. Too bad it’s only a few doors down from the Lift building and an obvious refuge. Unseen above her head, elegant loops of red neon declare, HAPPYLAND DIME-A-DANCE. She’s up the stairs.

Lila Mae hears music.

She pushes against the scratched swinging doors at the top of the dirty staircase and lets the music out.

She walks slowly, like one who emerges from a downpour, acclimating herself to sudden warmth and the receding storm. She barely sees the two bouncers, two gorillas in lime sports jackets, who perch on metal stools by the door. Thick black mustaches shrub beneath their nostrils, intrepid vegetation on petrous faces. They nod at Lila Mae and do not speak. Their elbows rest on their knees, they stare at the crack between the doors. There is no need to keep her out.

On a round wooden platform at the far end of the room, so distant as to be a distant city on the horizon, the conductor’s arms glide. His back is to the dancers, and all are left to imagine his face from the stringy gray hair drooping unruly over his jacket collar. The tails of his tuxedo jigger. He waves his hands through humid air and the musicians’ eyes flit between the sheet music and his rapier’s tip, the incisions he makes in the humid air. They do not look at the dancers either, at their languid movements, the inevitably perverted manifestations of their work. For they understand that the dancers are flesh and weak and can never live up to what the musicians deliver from their gravid instruments. Understanding that something is always lost when it comes to human beings.

The men who do not dance sit along one wall, in a line of red seats that have been retrieved from the rubble of a demolished theater. In opera seats, one seat or two or three between them, they watch the dance floor, regretting incidents. The women here have been instructed against aggression, the hard sell. There is no need — these men, in their threadbare suits, choking on fat neckties, with their broken postures, are easy sells. The management knows that they scurry here out of the rain with ideas and will approach, in due time, the women when their moldy ideations have settled on a suitable vessel. The women have sifted through bargain racks in bargain districts, chosen polka-dot prints and obscure flower patterns. Fat arms and thin arms, swollen thighs and emaciated necks. The men choose from the bargain racks. The music urges and a man chooses a woman and they dance for a dime.

She looks at the door. John has not stabbed the bouncers yet. The bouncers stare at the doors, their backs to the dancers. They reserve their attention for manic bruisers and juiced-up hopheads who do not understand the nature of this particular establishment. She can envision John mangled at the bottom of the stairs, where all the rough trade ends up. Unless, she thinks, he kills the gorillas or incapacitates them, distracts them with two slabs of raw beef.

He is the only colored gentleman waiting to dance. He watches the dancers, the aloft couples, through fixed eyes. His suit is shiny, returning light in patches on his elbows and knees. It is an old suit. He does not see her until his dry hand is in hers and his arm sockets surrender to her tugging. He is up on his tentative feet, led by her to the dance floor.

The first song, caught halfway through, swiftly indoctrinates them. They are new to each other. Stiffly, gingerly, he places his arm around her waist, the other clasps her hand. She is rigid. Their feet obey the music and she fears he will fall, he is so frail. His gray and black hair is glued to his scalp by punctilious application of grease, a stream of static waves. She understands it is the style he has preferred for years, decades. His hair gradually falling into gray, as if age were the beckoning bottom of the shaft. Dust and mice. He smells dimly of smoky cologne. His pinstriped suit is patterned with crimson lines alternating with gray lines. Her partner is thin and disappearing. A ruby flash of handkerchief pokes from his chest pocket, perhaps at one point the same color of the suit but it has not faded, now a flare in her eye, an echo of finer times and better circumstances.

She does not know this song. The other dancers do, or pretend to, marshaling limbs and hips in a way she has never understood. Like the rest of her brethren in the Department, she does not like to dance. He leads. His arm braces her back. His hand is rough in hers, a working man’s hand, crenellated by toil. She remembers her childhood chores, running out with a bucket to the outside pump. It has been a long time since she worked with her hands. He looks up at her. His skin has a reddish tinge, maybe some Indian in there, maybe he’s from the Caribbean. First generation. Around them the dancers are balloons, directed by unseen currents, slow and bright in this dry refuge, a panoply of trajectories. They are loose, cut a rug. The women are pros, the men driven. The men think, this is the last night on earth and I am spending it in the arms of a beautiful woman. The women are not necessarily beautiful, but anything is possible. The women count dimes, ponder the bills waiting on top of the icebox. The bills are gratified a dime at a time, steadily.

Her face is not painted like the other women’s, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His teeth are amber and cracked. He leads, she follows his lead and looks at the bouncers, who have not moved. The bouncers stare at the doors like she stares at her partner’s scalp: into blankness. His ears are brown and pink, a baby’s ears, and him so old. Hairs stick out.

The first song ends. He looks up at her and then digs in his pockets for coins. The fare. She shakes her head. The next song begins and he holds his hands open to her: Shall we? Her partner likes this slower tempo. His step is more confident, his grip a pinch. It reminds him of another song. It’s our song, calcified by incident into pure memory. It’s a powerful substance, pure memory, it irradiates. (She does not hear the commotion at the door. The bouncers have beaten an interloper, someone who did not understand what this place is.) Who is she now to him: his wife, his daughter, that old sweetheart, all lost now. What remains of them is this, this song. Over his shoulder, the other dancers reenact their elemental dramas. Arguments over nothing. Incandescent lovemaking. Who are they to each other, the women who work here (blistered feet, down payments on better futures), the men who come here with loose change (what is lost will be regained). The conductor’s back is turned, his arms sprites.

Who is he to her? A ghost. She asks her partner, who is not her partner now but someone who is dead and will not answer except in what remains of him, his words, “Why did you do it?”

“You’ll understand.”

“I’ll never understand.”

“You already do.”

Another mid-tempo number begins. The ballroom is appreciative. Without knowing when, she has taken the lead from her partner and now she guides their steps. His eyes are closed and she sees the small brown bumps on his tight eyelids. It is safe in here in the eye of the storm. Outside, down the stairs, out on the street, the city retreats under angry wet assault, high pressure. Low spirits out in the city tonight. It came unexpectedly. The news said a little rain, that’s all. Not this. The sewers are full, the gutters are drowned and disgorge litter, doctor’s bills and bank statements, they float higher, to the sidewalk levees and over them. The citizens pull the shades back and wait for the end. Lobbies and delicatessen floors wet now.

In here it is dry, in these red walls fading to pink. This new song is slow. She feels rain on her bosom but it is not rain but his tears. His chest shudders against her chest. She says, “Let it out.” She can see every distinct hair on his head, the veins of blood vivid beneath the scalp. She leads. Her feet are sure on these warped wooden floors. It is safe in here. Out of the metropolitan welter. She has been leading them in an irregular square, repeating the pressure in this one area as if repetition will make them real, wear down the barrier into the next world. The other couples sway. They revolve around her and her partner, shuttling near and far in private orbits. Each partner, thrown against the other, is shelter, a polite warmth. The city is gone. This room is a bubble floating in the dark murk. The ballroom lights still warm the soul, the band continues to play through some mysterious dispensation. The bodies of the others move gently around her and her partner. A reprieve for those here tonight in the Happyland Dime-A-Dance.

Part TWO

From the lost notebooks of James Fulton:

By the ninetieth floor, everything is air, but that’s jumping ahead a bit. It starts with the first floor, with dirt, with idiocy. As if we were meant for this. As if this is what fire meant, or language. To crawl about, prey to the dull obviousness of biology, as if we were not meant to fly. To lift. It starts on the first floor, with the grub’s-eye view of the world: dirt. What will, happen: it will move from the first floor, from safety, from all you’ve ever known and that takes a bit of recalibrating your imagination. To recognize that come-hither look of possibility. Trust in the cab, made by people like you, trust is the worst of it: it was made by people like you and you are weak and you make mistakes. They have incorrectly imagined this journey, misfigured the equipment necessary. By the fifth floor, the unavoidable consideration of physical laws, the slender fragility of the cables holding the car. Your own fragility. The elevator does not complain, climbs in a bubble of safety, fifteen and sixteen and twenty-six floors and no mishap: well that’s no comfort, the accident could come at any time, and the higher up the worse it will be. Could anything survive a fall from this height? They say they have safety devices but things can go wrong and things often go wrong. Giddy at forty — made it this far. And yet still so much to say goodbye to if this is the end. This floor, fifty, where they all wait, those who will not receive apologies, the dead, those who have been wronged and are too low now for reconciliation. Those broken by your passage, the odd ricochets of your passage to this ride: there’s nothing to be done. There is only the ride. At seventy-five no turning back. No need for safety devices because there’s only up, this ascension. It is not so bad, this thing, that world falling away below and there are sturdy cables and a fine cab, dependable allies. Even the thought, if there were only more time, possesses no weight here, for nothing has weight, it has all been taken care of, the motor can handle any mass differential between the cab and the counterweight, that’s its job, and what wish could possibly weigh so much that the machine could not accommodate it? Half enjoying it now. The walls are falling away, and the floor and the ceiling. They lose solidity in the verticality. At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension. It’s all bright and all the weight and cares you have been shedding are no longer weight and cares but brightness. Even the darkness of the shaft is gone because there is no disagreement between you and the shaft. How can you breathe when you no longer have lungs? The question does not perturb, that last plea of rationality has fallen away floors ago, with the earth. No time, no time for one last thought, what was the last thing I thought last night before I fell asleep, the very last thought, what was it, because before you can think that thought everything is bright and you have fallen away in the perfect elevator.

* * *

The grid is quiet this Sunday morning. The citizens do not live this far downtown. Too much power in the lattice. Some tried. They discovered their hair on the pillow upon waking, fingernails and teeth loose and swimming in their flesh. Never mind the impossible prospect of organizing complete sentences. (She tightens her tie, tinkers with her collar.) So no one lives in the financial district anymore, no one lives too close to the humming municipal temples. The streets of Federal Plaza are deserted and there are no shadows for the clouds, which snare the light and stain every ray silver. She parked outside Mama’s Bakery last night for a few hours, clambered over the upholstery into the back seat, nestled into a corner but did not sleep. At the first alarms of dawn she pulled her dress over her head. Armed herself in her Monday suit — not the right day, of course, but her calendar’s been scrambled of late. A manufacturing defect. It is not as crisp as she likes it; the erectile reserves of Chinese laundry starch have been woefully depleted. Her suit is good enough for what she needs to do, however, as far as she can tell from the automobile’s tiny mirrors. She rubs spit into a dry patch of skin below her right eye. She drags her fingers through her hair.

It started here. A week ago. It is in its guts.

Lila Mae pounds on the door for ten minutes (she counts) before the sleeping guard steps out of the darkened lobby and up to the glass. His tight brown curly hair points in wild directions and is firmly matted on the right hemisphere, the same side of his face, it turns out, that is bloodless and etched with odd wrinkles. Lila Mae presses her badge up to the glass. He pauses to scratch his right buttock before unhooking the wide loop of keys on his belt.

“I thought you guys were all finished with Number Eleven,” he says.

“It’s never finished,” she says, halfway down the lobby, brogues clattering on the faux marble like hooves, charging like a bull.

She hears, distantly, the keys rattle as the guard locks the front door. His voice in the fog: “You need me to let you into the basement?” She does not look back. He’s already been ejected from consciousness, got the bum’s rush from her psyche. Lila Mae stands in the middle of Elevator Bank B. This is the longest she’s gone between inspections since she joined the Department. Never taken a vacation, and here she is a whole nine days since she departed 125 Walker. She lays her palms on the first floor entrance of Elevator Number Eleven of the Fanny Briggs building. She feels the metal beneath the green industrial paint. It is black and cool. Ambient temperature. From far away, she hears the guard ask a question but she cannot make it out because it is so far away.

Nothing.

At first she decides on Number Ten, next-door neighbor to the dear departed. She presses the call button and can hear, she thinks, the selector rouse groggily, still damp from dreaming. A click. Then she changes her mind and goes for Number Fourteen, Eleven’s opposite in Bank B. Fourteen is also flanked by two elevators, and must share that distinct middle child anxiety. A bell rings, cheerful and pert: it will never get more cynical and embittered, that bell, never flag in its cheer through hundreds of thousands of chimes. It wasn’t built that way. Number Fourteen welcomes its passenger and the passenger boards.

Arbo recalled their Metropolitans a year after their heavily promoted release to fix a small but eventually significant cosmetic problem. Seems the cleaning agent used by the city’s maintenance army didn’t sit very well with the cab’s inner panels of simulated wood: after a hundred applications or so of Scrubbo, the panels began to take on a green-brown color in odd patches, in shapes that reminded more than one person of mold. Disease. In short, the cleaning agent and the paneling didn’t take to each other. One approach might have been to instruct the owner of the new, deluxe Metropolitans to use a different cleaner, one less caustic and reactive to the sensitive skin of the elevators. It was not to be. The city had purchased, at a very reasonable price, at generous manhandled discount, a lifetime supply of this certain Scrubbo. What “lifetime supply” entailed exactly when it comes to a city was never fully hammered out; suffice it to say that there are crates and crates of the stuff in basements of government buildings, in janitors’ closets throughout the municipality, and they all proudly display the beguiling purple smile of the Scrubbo mascot, for whom no job is too dirty. The politicians refused to budge on this Scrubbo matter. It had been paid for. Indeed, it was agreed that the incident was Arbo’s fault for not properly testing their equipment for possible safety hazards (there is not, and has never been, any evidence for a link between the cab’s unsightly dermatological problem and human illness), and, in addition, there might be a lawsuit on the horizon. Even up in their towers, behind reinforced glass, Arbo knew which way the wind was blowing. They changed the panels for free, and to this day the Arbo Metropolitan is the elevator most city employees associate with their hapless drudgery, a fact supported over the years by polls solemnly conducted by the United Elevator Co.

These are new Arbo Metropolitans, Lila Mae notes: the inside panels do not betray the characteristic scratch marks left by the less than circumspect Arbo repairmen when they replaced the blighted panels. She noticed this fact on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. She tells herself, do not look at Number Fourteen. She is in this car to help recall, completely, her inspection of Number Eleven, which now sits in the morgue a few buildings away, in grotesque shards on metal trays. She does not wish to taint her reenactment. The reverberations of Number Fourteen’s idling drive insinuate themselves through her shoes, sing up through the muscles in her leg. She shuts them out. She does not feel them. Closes her eyes. Lila Mae reaches out into the darkness and presses the glass convexity of a button.

Number Fourteen’s counterweight begins its decent into the shaft, diffident and wary.

This is the wrong darkness. It is the darkness of this day and this time and this elevator and Lila Mae needs that further-back darkness, the one she encountered on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. She can’t touch the walls of this elevator as she did those of Number Eleven, for fear of taint. She imagines her hand extending out to the unyielding solidity of that dead elevator’s walls, the way the inner paneling embraced her hand’s curves. She’s, she’s almost at that darkness now. It is a slow curtain dropping before this day’s darkness. There. This new darkness is the old darkness of Number Eleven. She watches the sure and untroubled ascent of Number Eleven. The genies appear on cue, dragging themselves from the wings. The genie of velocity, the genie of the hoisting motor’s brute exertions, the red cone genie of the selector as it ticks off the entity’s progress through the shaft, the amber nonagon genie of the grip shoes as they skip frictionless up T-rails. All of them energetic and fastidious, describing seamless verticality to Lila Mae in her mind’s own tongue. They zigzag and circle, hop from foot to foot, fluctuate for her, their only spectator, the only one who’s ever in the seats out there. They gyrate for her and reenact without omission their roles from last Thursday’s performance. The genies never forget their lines. Lila Mae rises steady, Number Eleven is a smooth ride, alright. The genies bow and do not linger for her lonely applause. She opens her eyes. The doors open to the dead air of the forty-second floor. She hits the Lobby button.

Nothing.

* * *

And if nothing and Chancre are telling the truth (she now believes he is, mistrust now as useless as trust), then this was a catastrophic accident. That is what the remains will give up to Forensics’ latex probings: nothing. No telltale incision scar on an innocent inch of coaxial cable, no wires corkscrewing off the famously dependable antilocks. Nothing at all. (A few days from now when this is all over, Lila Mae will think to call Chuck for the exact wording of Forensics’ findings, and his confirmation will seem to her remote: without meaning.) You don’t expect them in the early failure phase; they usually pop up during the random failure phase, in adolescence, the fruit of malevolent pathology. Something gave in the elevator for no reason and its brother components gave in, too. A catastrophic accident. The things that emerge from the black, nether reaches of space and collide here, comets that connect with this frail world after countless unavailing ellipses. Emissaries from the unknowable. (The security guard assigned to the Fanny Briggs building watches her stumble from Number Fourteen, proceed across the lobby, blind, and tug on the locked front door.) She is never wrong when it comes to Intuitionism. Things occur to her. What her discipline and Empiricism have in common: they cannot account for the catastrophic accident. Did the genies try to warn her, were they aware, twitching at times, forbidden to make plain their knowledge but subtly attempting to alert her through the odd wiggle and shimmy. She wouldn’t know what to look for. Whatever signals the genies may or may not have dispatched through her darkness went unread. She imagines the proximity of the catastrophe sending ripples through the darkness from the future, agitating the genies with impending violence. It’s irrelevant. She didn’t see it. (She doesn’t appear to see him. The guard watches as she continues to pull at the front door even though the lock does not give. She keeps trying.) Chancre and Pompey did not lie, and no one else sabotaged Number Eleven, she’s sure of that too. How often do catastrophic accidents touch down here. The last one in this country was what, she searches after it, thirty-five years ago, out West. The ten passengers (midjoke, aimless perusal of the inspection certificate, fondling house-key weight in trouser pockets, trying not to whistle) had time to scream, of course, but not much else. The investigators (and what a hapless bunch they would have been, the field so young) never found any reason for it. Total freefall. What happens when too many impossible events occur, when multiple redundancy is not enough. Scratching heads over this mystery of the new cities. The last recorded incident of total freefall happened in the Ukraine, and was eventually traced to an inept contractor’s failure to properly install the progressive brakes in the undercarriage. Five died. She can’t remember the make of the elevator — what company was most popular in that region at that time. Can’t remember. (Finally the guard unlocks the door. She still doesn’t see him. He watches her stagger down the broad stone steps, about to fall any number of times.) Nobody in her business would wish a catastrophic accident on their worst enemy. They’re a superstitious lot, and envious and bitter of every colleague’s success, but wish a crash like this on a nemesis and you’re just asking for one yourself — with you in it, hollering against probability all the way down. It’s not even probability because it’s beyond calculation. It’s fate.

They won’t find any reason for this crash, trace the serial number back to the manufacturer, interrogate an arthritic mechanic’s trembling fingers. This was a catastrophic accident.

“Poor Number Eleven,” Lila Mae says — one moment of feeling for the unfortunate victim, that’s all, before rerouting the incident to her own purposes: it was a catastrophic accident, and a message to her. It was her accident.

The elevator pretended to be what it was not. Number Eleven passed for longevous. Passed for healthy so well that Arbo Elevator Co.’s quality control could not see its duplicity, so well that the building contractors could not see for the routine ease of its assembly coeval doom. So well that Lila Mae Watson of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, who is never wrong, did not see it. Did it know? After all of Fulton’s anthropomorphism: did the machine know itself. Possessed the usual spectrum of elevator emotion, yes, but did it have articulate self-awareness. Erlich, the mad Frenchman, of course, posited such but he never gets invited to conferences and his monographs wilt on the shelves of his relatives’ libraries. Did it decide to pass? To lie and betray itself? Even Fulton stayed away from the horror of the catastrophic accident: even in explicating the unbelievable he never dared broach the unknowable. Lila Mae thinks: out of fear.

She has not realized her destination, what she is driving toward, despite the fact there is only one place she will reach on this route. Out of the tunnel now, her destination could not be more obvious: still, she hasn’t realized it yet. Distracted as she is by this latest inspection currently underway in her head.

Is his black box immune to the comet of the catastrophic accident. It is all jumbled now, machinations eclipsing machinations. For a second, she doubts that Fulton was colored: it could have been another one of Natchez’s lies. Something he and his masters cooked up to reel her in. She sees the scene, hovering above the highway a few automobile lengths ahead: Reed and Natchez in the downstairs study of Intuitionist House, sipping smoky antique scotch as they check their net for frayed strands. Natchez knows the open windows of a colored girl’s heart, he’s had many, Reed knows the attended latches of the Intuitionist mind, his weaknesses are hers. The progress of their scheme: Natchez hadn’t developed his film of the Intuitionist pages because he had never taken any photographs; he had been studying them all along. Tried to keep her from going to the Lift building for fear she might discover their plan. I’ve been reading a lot about elevators since I found out about my uncle. He knew all he needed to know about elevators for some time now.

No traffic on this Sunday morning, which is fortunate because she’s not paying a whit of attention to the road. She’s been this way many times. She will not take the wrong exit.

If she had met him for dinner, he would have detailed, fork jabbing above their medium-rare steaks and umbrella-adorned cocktails, his infiltration of Chancre’s office, the close escapes, how swiftly he discovered Fulton’s notes. His colleagues at Arbo, no doubt, obtained copies of whatever material had been sent to the Empiricists and United as soon as they discovered they were not the only ones to receive the mysterious dispatches. Trash her apartment when they suspect her of collaborating with Chancre, force her into Natchez’s company: if she does not trust the Intuitionists, perhaps she will trust one of her tribe, his story of correcting the injustices done to her race.

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man’s books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

She is driving on this Sunday morning to her alma mater, the Institute for Vertical Transport, to find out why her name is in Fulton’s journals. To question the only person she can ask now, the one who can explain why Arbo needed to win her confidence. Why a man she never met willed her into his death.

Catastrophic accidents are a-million-in-a-million occurrences, not so much what happens very seldom but what happens when you subtract what happens all the time. They are, historically, good or bad omens, depending on the time and place, urging in reform, a quest for universal standards of elevator maintenance, or instructing the dull and plodding citizens of modernity that there is a power beyond rationality. That the devil still walks the earth and architecture is no substitute for prayer, for cracked knees and desperate barter with the gods.

She does not hear the car horn, let alone the urgency of the car horn. She drifts into the right lane and almost sideswipes the mock wood paneling of the station wagon. The kids in the backseat scream, pink lungs heaving, father’s hands grip the steering wheel, but for all the commotion of this few seconds there is no accident. Lila Mae’s automobile and the family’s automobile do not crash. She decelerates and eases into the shoulder of the highway, gravel popping on the undercarriage. Rests her head on the green rubber of the steering wheel.

Arbo and Natchez are merely unanswered questions. Their intrusion into her life is a matter of cause and effect, prospering along logical trajectories of greed, and only require adequate information to explain them. Time to sift the facts through her fingers and shake out the fine silt until what is left in her hand is what happened. But there is still this matter of Fulton and Intuitionism. She thinks, what passing for white does not account for: the person who knows your secret skin, the one you encounter at that unexpected time on that quite ordinary street. What Intuitionism does not account for: the catastrophic accident the elevator encounters at that unexpected moment on that quite ordinary ascent, the one who will reveal the device for what it truly is. The colored man passing for white and the innocent elevator must rely on luck, the convenience of empty streets and strangers who know nothing, dread the chance encounter with the one who knows who they are. The one who knows their weakness.

She believes the documentary evidence Natchez showed her, even if his blood tie to Fulton has been exposed as a lie. (Back on the highway now: she hadn’t pulled over to ponder the accident that didn’t happen but the one that did, ten days before.) Fulton was colored. In his books, the hatred of the corrupt order of this world, the keen longing for the next one, its next rules. He was the perfect liar the world made him, mouthing a supreme fiction the world accepted as truth. (Back on the highway, going where she’s going.) In constant fear of that shadow, the shadow of the catastrophic accident that would reveal him for what he was. The shadow that envelopes and makes him dark.

Almost there, Lila Mae.

The black gates of the Institute for Vertical Transport are open. On Sunday, the students depart campus to attend mass at the neighborhood churches. The churches of this town welcome all fellow believers, no matter where they were born, what circumstances and choices have led them here. She drives around the east side of campus, duly noting the squat edifice of Fulton Hall, the Engineering Building, even her old home, the Gymnasium, always quiet on a Sunday morning. Trees cluster respectfully at the side of the road as she approaches the declivity that marks the faculty housing. She parks. She closes the door of the sedan. It only takes a minute for Mrs. Rogers to answer her knock. Lila Mae says to the old woman, “He was joking, right? About Intuitionism. It was all a big joke.”

* * *

Sometimes when the wind drove the rain beneath the roof of the porch, when the wind was particularly upset at something or other, the rain would hit the front edge of the couch and wet it. That’s why the old brown couch always smelled so sour: old damp and mold. They never lifted it into the back of the truck and doomed it to the rotting piles at the town dump. It was an old couch and treasured for the solid parity it had achieved between its comforts and defects, so the Watson family kept it on the porch. One example of its magic: the porch paint did not peel if it was underneath the couch. And another: the right side had formed a perfect bucket for Marvin Watson’s behind, widening over the years, incredibly, as Marvin’s behind widened. Marvin sat in his groove that day and tapped the envelope against his thigh. He told his daughter when his waiting ceased, when she cracked down on the first steps of the porch, “Your mother went to the store. She gave me this.”

Lila Mae had hoped to intercept the letter at the mailbox and have time to read the words and consider them for a few days before she would tell or not tell her parents. Her schedule at Mrs. Applebaum’s made it impossible. She never knew when she was going to get out. She had considered bribing Mr. Granger, the mailman who served colored town, but had decided it too complicated. She saw the red crest of the Institute for Vertical Transport, which she had seen first a few months before in the town library, and saw the soft shark teeth where her mother had opened the letter, probably with one of the Watson household’s many dull knives. As her father extended the envelope to her he said, “You didn’t tell me you had applied.” The envelope was good paper. The thick, elegant paper they have up there. No broken mills, cheap mills, there. She withdrew the letter, it was still light enough to read without getting a headache. Her father watched her eyes. He wore his house clothes, the coarse trousers and heavy shirt he wore on the weekdays, before and after work. When he was out of the Huntley’s uniform. The house clothes changed. They were replaced every few years by new versions in different colors. The Huntley’s uniform, however, remained the same. Lila Mae saw it once. He snuck it out of work one day to show Lila Mae and her mother. Colored people were not allowed into Huntley’s if they wanted to buy things. Only if they worked there. She read the letter and replaced it in the envelope.

Her father asked, “What are you going to tell Mrs. Applebaum?”

“I told her I might be leaving to go to school. I told her that when I started.”

“You didn’t tell us,” her father answered. Then he said, “There’s no shortage of people who could take your place with Mrs. Applebaum.”

She had decided when she saw him on the couch. When she knew he knew. Lila Mae said, “I hate to leave you and Ma all by yourselves.”

Her father leaned back, to a verse of metal growling from inside the couch. He said, “You don’t worry about us. You worry about yourself. It’s not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it’s the same.”

* * *

He lived here, assembled his vehicular epiphanies here, mulled over the bolts and pins of his mythology in this very house. Mrs. Rogers leaves her in the ruined parlor. Beneath her, an angry slash of ripped upholstery grins ticking. The fireplace mantle has been swept clean — she can see the coat sleeves of the men who trashed her own apartment brush across it — and her host’s collection of ceramic horses are dashed to the floor, broken heads and limbs. The men’s fingers groped inside the couch and chairs after Fulton’s notebooks and Mrs. Rogers’s loose change, smashed the two emerald lamps to see what may or may not have been inside them, cracked the frame of Fulton’s portrait over taut knees. Lila Mae rubs her hands on her thighs and surveys the damage. The odor of cigar smoke lingers in the dull air and she can see a cigar butt ground into a photograph of Mrs. Rogers and her children, in happier times, not here. They didn’t find anything but must persist, a determined gang thundering through the houses of those who might possess the object. Their violent blundering seems so pathetic to Lila Mae now, a child’s plea for attention, a good hug. They’ll never find it.

Mrs. Rogers returns from the kitchen with tea and thin butter cookies. Lila Mae reads the old grooves in her skin, the ripples around her eyes and mouth, the after-images of old expressions. The human face is only capable of two or three real expressions, and they leave their mark. Lila Mae thinks, she only has one expression and what will her face look like forty years from now. Eroded rock, a wall of dry canyon. Mrs. Rogers sighs, “They gave this place a real going over. Just a fine mess they made. Broke all of my horses. Broke they legs off.” She doesn’t look at the mess on the floor, busying herself with the delicate disrobing of a sugar cube. “I was in the city visiting my sister and I come home to this.”

“Last night?” Lila Mae asks. “What time did you get back?”

“About eleven last night.”

Then they hit the place right after she left Ben Urich. When they realized she knew. Lila Mae’s been a practicing solipsist since before she could walk, and the days’ recent events are doing irreparable damage to her condition.

Mrs. Rogers points to a bucket in the corner. A gray dishrag slithers over its lip. Preoccupied, she says, “One of them relieved himself on the floor. You can’t smell it, can you?”

“I don’t smell a thing,” Lila Mae lies. “Did you call the police? Institute security?”

“What for? They probably the ones that did it.”

Lila Mae leans forward in her chair. “This is the first time, right? When you told the Institute that this place had been broken into after Fulton’s death and his notebooks stolen, you made that up, correct?”

“It may have been a lie,” Mrs. Rogers shrugs. Stands. She hasn’t touched her tea and snacks. It’s all ritual, Lila Mae appraises. Her host says, “I did most of the upstairs, but I haven’t finished down here. Do you want to give me a hand?” An old house and an old woman. She needs to preserve the rules of this place, the order she keeps beneath the pitched roof. Even though they have pissed on it. She bends over slowly before the fireplace and picks up one of her fallen horses. It kneels on its stomach in her rough palm. No legs. Mrs. Rogers gets down on the floor and looks for its legs.

Lila Mae grabs the broom that leans against the back of her chair. She picks an area, sweeps couch innards and shredded paper into mounds. The old woman says, “To answer your question, yes, he was having a joke on them at first, but it wasn’t a joke at the end. It became true.” She discovers one of the tiny thoroughbred’s legs under the newspaper rack and holds it up to the window. “You have to realize something about James,” continuing, tilting the leg in the sunlight. “Deep down he was real country. No kind of sense at all in his head except his own kind of sense. That’s what made him what he was.”

After all that has happened, Lila Mae figures she can put up with the woman’s drifting explanations. There’s no rush. Lila Mae says, “But he wasn’t who he was. He passed for white. He was colored.”

“Well look at you,” Mrs. Rogers says with exhaustion, sparing a second for a quick glance at her visitor. “Not the same girl who was knocking on my door last week, are you? With your chest all puffed out like a peacock. You’ve seen something between now and then, huh?” She places the horse on the mantle, where it rolls over on its side and exposes its white belly and manufacturer’s lot number. “I didn’t even know myself until his sister come up to visit one time, and I lived under the same roof with the man. I knew he wasn’t like no other white man I had worked for, but I didn’t think … She came up to the door one night — I don’t know, fifteen years ago? Twenty? Whenever it was, it was right before he wrote the second one of his Intuitionist books.”

This information isn’t hard to recall for Lila Mae. There was an eight-month break between the publication of Theoretical Elevators Volume One and Fulton’s embarkation on Volume Two. It was twenty years ago when Fulton’s sister knocked on his door. What did she look like. What do you say to a brother you have not seen for decades. Lila Mae can barely speak to people she saw last week.

“She shows up at the door,” Mrs. Rogers continues, “and tells me she has to see James. She was one of them down-home women. You could see she made herself the clothes she got on her back. I look her up and down because I don’t know who this woman is, and say I got to see if Mr. Fulton is receiving visitors. You should have seen his face when he walked down the stairs. His pipe fell right out of his mouth onto the floor — you can still see the carpet where he burned it. He starts fussing and telling me to go out to the store — suddenly he got to have fish for dinner. So I leave, and when I get back, she’s gone and James is sitting in his study reading his journals like nothing’s strange. Asks me what time will dinner be ready, just like that. He told me who she was later, but that was after.”

Did she bring photographs or bad news: the death of their mother. Money for burial costs. What do you say to your brother who you have not seen for many years. She can see them talking in this room. The furniture is the same, the day’s light thin and cold. He sits in the chair Lila Mae sat in, hands kneading the armrests. It is the moment he has feared since he left his town. When he will be revealed for who he is, the catastrophic accident. But his sister does not expose him. She did not make him crash. He was saved.

“It wasn’t soon after that he started acting funny,” Mrs. Rogers says. She has now retrieved four horses and eleven legs. They lay on the mantle as if on a battlefield. Their masters dead and dying. “Just little things a body wouldn’t notice at first, but then it creeped up on you.”

“Like when he dunked the provost’s head in the punch bowl at the groundbreaking ceremony.”

“That was later, but you on the right track,” Mrs. Rogers tells her. “He’d been in a pretty good mood because his first Intuitionist book was doing alright. It had been hard on him but now he was getting what he deserved. When he finished that first book he showed it to them up on the hill there. His colleagues. And they just tossed him out of there — he couldn’t get anyone to take it seriously. None of them wanted to touch it. So he paid for it himself, and it started. They believed it.”

She can’t decide which porcelain limb belongs to which porcelain horse. “I remember when the first reviews came out in one of those elevator journals,” she says, placing the leg next to a small white pony caught in fractured gallop. “He sits down right in the chair right there and starts reading it. I was in the kitchen cooking. I didn’t hear anything for a long time, and then I hear him laughing. You see, James was a very serious man. He had a sense of humor, but it was his own sense of humor. We lived in the same house for years and I don’t think there was one time when we both laughed at the same thing. That day I hear him laughing from the kitchen. Like I ain’t never heard him laugh before — like it was the biggest, best joke he ever heard. I come running out and ask him what’s so funny. And he just looks up at me and says, ‘They believe it.’ ”

She must be referring to Robert Manley’s famous mash note in Continental Elevator Review, which, if Lila Mae’s memory serves, anointed Fulton “the field’s greatest visionary since Otis” and “hope’s last chance against modernity’s relentless death march.” It was the first review to describe Fulton’s approach as “Intuitionist”: postrational, innate. Human. No wonder he laughed. His prank had succeeded. From that review’s cornices, the gargoyle of his mythology shook its stiff, mottled wings and conquered, city by city, whispering heresy, defecating on the robust edifices of the old order. No wonder he laughed.

Mrs. Rogers pulls Lila Mae back from distraction. Mrs. Rogers says, “I never seen him happy like that. He was happy for a whole week, and that’s the longest time I ever seen him happy. Then one night I’m down here doing my crosswords. I couldn’t sleep so I was doing my puzzles. James comes down from up there, wearing his robe — I thought he was in bed. He comes downstairs looking confused and upset and he says to me, ‘But it’s a joke. They don’t get the joke.’ ”

“He thought that someone would understand but they didn’t.”

She nods. “They had all their rules and regulations. They had all this long list of things to check in elevators and what made an elevator work and all, and he’d come to hate that. He told me — these are his words—‘They were all slaves to what they could see.’ But there was a truth behind that they couldn’t see for the life of them.”

“They looked at the skin of things,” Lila Mae offers. They couldn’t see his lie. It was Pompey that allowed her to see Fulton’s prank. The accident resounds in her still, the final notes of the crash the new background music of her mind. She had been so sure that Pompey had sabotaged Number Eleven — it appeased her sense of order. If Chancre wanted to set her up, any number in her Department would have been happy to oblige. But Lila Mae fixated on Pompey. The Uncle Tom, the grinning nigger, the house nigger who is to blame for her debased place in this world. Pompey gave them a blueprint for colored folk. How they acted. How they pleased white folks. How eager they would be for a piece of the dream that they would do anything for massa. She hated her place in their world, where she fell in their order of things, and blamed Pompey, her shucking shadow in the office. She could not see him anymore than anyone else in the office saw him.

Her hatred. Fulton’s hatred of himself and his lie of whiteness. White people’s reality is built on what things appear to be — that’s the business of Empiricism. They judge them on how they appear when held up to the light, the wear on the carriage buckle, the stress fractures in the motor casing. His skin. Picture this: Fulton, the Great Reformer, the steady man at the helm of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, gives up his chair when the elevator companies try to buy his favor, place him in their advertisements. They have already bought off many of the street men — building owners lay cash on inspectors in exchange for fastidious blindness to defect. Their sacred Empiricism has no meaning when it can be bought. When they can’t even see that this man is colored because he says he is not. Or doesn’t even say it. They see his skin and see a white man. Retreat behind the stone walls of the Institute does not change matters. He is still not colored. There is another world beyond this one. He was trying to tell them and they wouldn’t hear it. Don’t believe your eyes.

Mrs. Rogers says, “He was making a joke of their entire way of life and they couldn’t see. The joke wasn’t funny to him anymore. Once he realized that — that it was a joke but they didn’t see it like that, it wasn’t a joke anymore. His sister come to visit soon after that. He told me later she saw him in the newspaper. Like I said, he got strange after that. He started writing that second book. He’d lock himself in his study and he wouldn’t come out. I had to start leaving his dinner outside the door because he wouldn’t come down to eat. This went on for months and months. Then one day he comes down and says he finished.”

Lila Mae knew he was joking because he hated himself. She understood this hatred of himself; she hated something in herself and she took it out on Pompey. Now she could see Fulton for what he was. There was no way he believed in transcendence. His race kept him earthbound, like the stranded citizens before Otis invented his safety elevator. There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie. He secretes his venom into the pages of a book. He knows the other world he describes does not exist. There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.

Lila Mae looks at the old woman. She busies herself with her collection, attempting to right those mangled equine forms. They will not stand. The kind thing to do would be to put them out of their misery, but she will not do that. She hangs on to them. Perhaps one day they will be right again. Mrs. Rogers and Fulton living together in this house, as employer and employee. She tends to the colored business and he tends to his white business. Secretly kin, but she does not know that. So no, Lila Mae sees, he does not believe in the perfect elevator. He creates a doctrine of transcendence that is as much a lie as his life. But then something happens. Something happens that makes him believe, switch from the novel but diffuse generalities of Volume One to the concrete Intuitionist methodology of Volume Two. Now he wants that perfect elevator that will lift him away from here and devises solid method from his original satire. What did his sister say to him. What did he wish after their meeting. Family? That there could be, in the world he invented to parody his enslavers, a field where he could be whole? A joke has no purpose if you cannot share it with anyone. Lila Mae thinks, Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you. When he gives lectures to his flock, years later, they are not aware of what he is truly speaking. The elevator world will look like Heaven but not the Heaven you have reckoned.

Lila Mae hears a car door slam outside. Through the window, she sees her old Engineering professor Dr. Heywood lock the door of his car. Returning from church and prayer for the next place. Beyond. It is need. She has always considered herself an atheist. She has knelt beside her mother and father in church and said the words she was supposed to say, but she never believed them, and when she came North she stopped going. She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion. Anyone can start a religion. They just need the need of others.

They haven’t made much headway into the mess left, presumably, by Arbo and their bruiser army. Lila Mae, for her part, has spent the last few minutes sweeping up a mound of grit and then brushing it out into a thin layer before gathering it again. Mrs. Rogers has been fussing over her silly tchotchkes, her broken horses. It’s useless. Lila Mae asks, “Why did he put my name in his notebooks?”

Mrs. Rogers sits down on the couch. Too tired. Touches the side of the teapot and frowns. Cold. “Toward the end he knew he was going to die. He spent his days and nights all running around trying to finish his last project. Nights he went over to the library they named after him — he said he liked the peace there.” She’s looking at her hands. They’re palm-up in her lap, dead, overturned crabs. “He said he saw a light on in the room across the way, and one day he asked me if I knew what the name of the colored student on campus was. I told him I didn’t know, and that’s all I know about it.” Looking now in her visitor’s eyes. “You should take what’s left. I don’t want to hold on to it anymore. It’s too much.”

She rises and walks into the kitchen. Lila Mae can’t see what she’s doing. But she hears it. Hears squeaking, it takes her a few seconds to place it. It is an old pulley, doing what it was meant to do. There’s a dumbwaiter in the kitchen. A primitive hand elevator containing all the principles of verticality. She hears rocks scraping.

When the old woman returns, she holds a stack of notebooks, Fulton’s cherished Fontaines, wrapped loosely in a shred of stained leather. The sacred scrolls, of course. What did she do? Lila Mae can see it: she’s removed some bricks from the back wall of the dumbwaiter shaft and opened up a shallow dark hole. Where the texts waited. They stand for a minute, the two colored women, face to face, a generation and two feet apart, djinns of dust whirling in the shafts of afternoon light between them. Lila Mae takes the notebooks into her hands. It’s a good weight. She asks, “What made you send out the packages?”

The old woman says, “He left instructions. He said when I sent them out, someone would come.”

* * *

She got lucky the first place she checked out. She wanted to live in the colored part of the city after so long in the pale alien territory of the Institute. Graduation exercises done, Lila Mae was on her own. She needed a place to live because she had a job in the city. The first colored woman in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. She wanted to tell all the people on the sidewalk of her accomplishment, that old dignified lady on the stoop fanning herself with a newspaper, the steel-eyed cop on the corner with the sun in his buttons. That she’d made it through. The first woman of her race to earn a badge. Grab their shoulders and shake them. They wouldn’t care, of course. No one knew what kept this city up and climbing. They didn’t know her and it was the first hot day of summer.

It was the island’s colored neighborhood but it was not the colored town she’d grown up in. It had come into being overnight when the industrialists’ tunnels broke the surface and they laid a sign: SUBWAY STOP HERE. These rowhouses, tenements, the lines of them across the Island from river to river. That’s how the first tenants found this neighborhood and that’s how she found it. She emerged from the heat of the underground tunnel and pondered the intersection. Any street as viable as any other. Lila Mae randomly picked one amiable block. Halfway down, after dodging the white spray of an open fire hydrant, she saw the sign. ROOMS FOR RENT, the little afterthought VACANCY swinging on two iron hooks beneath it.

The real estate speculator who had staked out this street’s acres had opted for six-story tenements with Italianate facades, gray and sturdy. Rooms for whole families; later, two or three families in one apartment. A good investment. A skinny white man with damp black hair sat on the stoop listening to a horse race on his small radio. He mopped his brow with a rag as he yelled at the announcer, ladling out invective. Lila Mae patiently waited for the race to end and hoped that the man’s fortunes would not have an impact on his answers to her queries. He wore gray trousers held true by red suspenders and a dirty white sleeveless T-shirt. She noticed the engraving in the arch above the door: THE BERTRAM ARMS. He didn’t wait to hear the end of the race, suddenly clicking the knob with another volley of curses. Lila Mae said, “Excuse me, sir, I’m looking for the building manager.”

He looked her over. “You want a room?”

“Yes. The sign says—”

“I know what it says. Come on up,” he told her, scooping up the radio, “I’ll show it to you.”

The lobby still had its first coat of paint, queasy green coated with a healthy layer of dust trapped by congealed grease from apartment stoves. She didn’t like the smell but figured she could get used to it if she had to. “It’s on the fifth floor,” the man said. “The windows face east, and that side of the building gets a lot of light in the morning.” She followed him up the smooth steps. “No pets. Some of the tenants got pets but they’re not s’pposed to.” The heat of the day waited inside the halls. Some of the doors to the apartments were ajar to allow cross-ventilation but Lila Mae could not get a good look inside them as they climbed higher. The rooms were quiet. “There are pay phones on each floor. People generally get their messages, but you have to be nice to your neighbors.”

He opened the door to apartment 27. “See for yourself,” he said. He waited outside.

It wasn’t that big but it was clean, more or less. She could still see the vague outlines of the previous tenant’s pictures dust-scored into the walls. She saw that there were two rooms, a large main room and a smaller one that might fit a small bed. She didn’t have many things. They’ve probably cut up these apartments a bit, Lila Mae thought. She could fit a bed in there. Bigger than her room at the Institute, anyway, and she’d lived in that box for three years.

It was stuffy because the windows were closed. Lila Mae walked to the window and let the air in. She could see pretty far east, until a couple of large buildings cut off the view of the river. She’d rather face the really tall stuff downtown, but there was time for that. Without turning from the window she yelled, “How much did you say this was?”

“Fifteen dollars and forty-five cents a week,” the man said. “Due each Monday. And a three-dollar key deposit.”

She considered the room. It was a good deal, she thought. She could swing it on her salary. A new start. Lila Mae thought, she could make a home in the city.

* * *

She has been here before. In the hard plaza, among the stone animals. Whether the granite menagerie was Arbo’s idea or the sculptor’s vision is not clear. The animals — a baby rhino, a lion, a hyena, on cocked forelegs, with drooping necks, irisless eyes — watch a horizon that does not exist for the buildings, stoop to drink from an oasis that does not exist for the concrete. Any symbolism intended to illuminate Arbo’s corporate mission or personality is lost on Lila Mae. The animals don’t move. Men and women in conservative businesswear keep their distance as they navigate the plaza, towards subways and watering holes and lunch establishments. Prey, afraid deep in the strata of their consciousness of the predator’s waking, improbable and impending.

Lila Mae has been here before. In her last semester at the Institute for Vertical Transport. Arbo invited the graduating class to a recruitment meeting conducted in a long room with glass walls high above the street. As Lila Mae and her fellows sipped coffee and nibbled at French pastries, the tall man from Arbo, in his dark and expensive suit, described the nurturing atmosphere and opportunities for advancement the elevator manufacturing concern could offer graduates of the most prestigious elevator inspection school in the country. At one time he, too, was fresh out of elevator school and eager to rescue the cities. At one time, he revealed, he was lured by the romance of life in the trenches, the dizzy rush of wrestling the devices to the ground until they confessed, the holy crusade against defect. Arbo offers more, he said, his hands wide across the vista behind him, the low countries beyond the city, the very clouds palpable. Arbo creates the future, he told them, inspectors serve the future. The students considered their shabby clothes and the grimy institutional yellow of Department offices. These recruitment sessions at elevator companies were a ritual. Lila Mae considered them a final test of their commitment to public service. Temptation. In all the years of the process, not one student had ever forsaken the lure of the streets, the moral imperative of the good work. They trickle to the corporate world only after a tour of duty down there, in the shadows, dodging rats. Only after being tested, after considering the grim pennies of a city paycheck, do they return to Arbo and United and the rest, defeated, hats in hand, begging for release and better suits. Near graduation time, the elevator concerns extend invitations, and the students listen to the devil and hold their ground.

The Arbo Building is one of the tallest in the city, as befits a company whose prosperity is an index to verticality. As big as they are, they cannot fill the building: they enable the city and leave it to others to fill, as it has always been. Lila Mae has to ask the security guard at the front desk where the man’s office is. He consults a ledger. He directs her to Elevator Bank C, the express elevators. Arbo cannot fill the entire building, but they’ve got dibs on the top floors. It keeps them on their toes: no matter how high they are, the sky still distracts and reminds that there is always higher.

The express elevator is empty, one of the latest Arbo models, and silent as it disdains the low floors. Ignores them. Lila Mae rides alone. She so rarely rides with civilians, the people who justify her profession. Or former profession. She’s not on the clock today. Not this Monday.

On the eightieth floor, the receptionist asks if she can help Lila Mae, her voice cheer in a vacuum. Lila Mae says she’s here to see Raymond Coombs. She gives her name. The receptionist enunciates into the squat gray intercom. Coombs is startled, words crackling into the flat air of the office. He instructs the receptionist to let her pass.

The carpet is pliant under her feet, chewing up those brogues of hers. In the hallway she passes a display case containing a miniature replica of Arbo’s first machine, the Excelsior. The brochure reprinted on a placard behind the glass promises “a delightful marriage of luxury and industry, where passengers can ride comfortably, ferried to the destination by the very best of today’s mechanical conveyance.” The hallways are silent, everybody’s in their offices or out somewhere. Lila Mae stalls out before the antique device. It seems sad to Lila Mae. They do not care about comfort anymore. There’s no more hiding the machine’s purpose, out with the couches and engravings of griffins and nymphs. Below the manufacturer’s oath, Lila Mae sees an endorsement from the management of the Charleston Hotel, the recipient of the prototype lift. It says, “The upper floors can now be the most desirable in the house, whence the guest makes the transit in less than half a minute of repose and quiet, and, arriving there, enjoys a purity and coolness of atmosphere and an exemption from noise, dust and exhalations.” They took the wrecking ball to the old Charleston years ago. Wasn’t tall enough.

Raymond Coombs’s office lacks one wall. Substituted is glass; but for the blinds stacked up by the ceiling, Coombs’s back could be to air. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbow. He wears a crisp white oxford shirt punished by gold suspenders — corporate creation as opposed to the coarse fabrics of the man’s former disguise. Those struggling working-man stitches. His tie is red and green and shiny. She says, “Nice office,” looking beyond him to the dirty river hundreds of feet below.

Coombs says, “I’ve paid my dues.” He closes a file on his desk. To be truthful, he is more surprised at being interrupted at his paperwork than at her appearance in his office. He removes his tortoise-shell glasses and places them in his shirt pocket.

Lila Mae notices a photograph on the east wall of the room, a head shot of the famous reverend. The man who is so loud down South. She says, pointing, “They let you have his picture up.”

“My employers allow me a certain latitude,” he responds, shrugging. “I do my job and that’s all they care about. Would you like a seat?”

She stands. “When did it start? That Friday or before that?”

He purses his lips and considers. “As soon as we saw your name in his notebooks. Personally, I didn’t think much of it. The codebreakers downstairs spent two days working this column of numbers we found in the margin of one of the notebook pages. Didn’t get anywhere. It turned out Fulton was just trying to add up his dry cleaning bill. He put all kinds of shit in there. So, no, at first your name being in his notebooks didn’t mean anything in and of itself, but the guys upstairs wanted us to follow up every lead.”

The intercom buzzes. Raymond Coombs instructs the young woman at the front desk that he doesn’t want to be disturbed.

Lila Mae nods toward the photograph on the desk. “That your wife?”

“Married for twelve years. Works over at Metropolitan Hospital. She’s a registered nurse.”

“Kids?”

“A boy.” Coombs turns the photograph from view. His voice is an octave or two higher than it was in Intuitionist House, in her hotel room. He says, “We didn’t know what you knew, if anything. We’d already dispatched Jim and John to your apartment, but once we heard about the accident at Fanny Briggs, I thought it might be wise to send Reed up there to intercept. I figured the news of the black box might be enough to flush you out. See what you knew. The accident changed everything. It was a bonus. That made it personal. Yes,” he says, fingers flitting on his club tie, “I’d have to say that the accident helped things considerably.”

His eyes travel slowly down her body, rest on the brown leather satchel she holds across her abdomen. “Do you want me to go on?” he asks.

She nods. No one could foresee the accident.

“At first we really did think that Chancre had sabotaged Number Eleven,” he says, finishing-school diction all the way, “but our spies informed us that he was as surprised as we were. Luckily, you were fixated on the idea, with our encouragement, and that Pompey fellow. At least you were predictable that way,” he says, grinning. “Let one colored in and you’re integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.”

She doesn’t take the bait. “Keep talking,” Lila Mae orders.

“Once we knew we had you,” he continues, “I saw that you could still be useful, even if we weren’t sure about what you knew about the notebooks. You certainly didn’t give up any information, but we just chalked that up to what we’d read in your Department file — that you didn’t trust anybody. I told Reed to send you to see Fulton’s old maid — the old bat wasn’t responding to any of our overtures. But when you didn’t come back after that, I had to turn on the charm. It threw us for a loop.”

He no longer speaks like a colored man from the South. Like Natchez. Nor is his face the same as it was, in this fluorescent light, in this circulated air. The leather is sure in her hands. She traces the zipper’s serrations with a fingertip. “How’d you find out about Fulton?” she asks.

“A few years ago when we realized his later stuff was missing, we just did the legwork no one had had a reason to do before. Found out where he came from. His sister had just died. She didn’t have any heirs, so we just bought her estate. Using the term loosely, of course.”

“No one cares where he came from.”

“Not particularly. Colored people think two of our presidents were colored. We make noises about it, but nothing ever comes of it. The rank and file in the industry won’t believe, and those who know care more about his last inventions. His color doesn’t matter once it gets to that level. The level of commerce. They can put Fulton into one of those colored history calendars if they want — it doesn’t change the fact that there’s money to be made from his invention.”

“You certainly earn your pay.” The gold lettering outside his door read, RAYMOND COOMBS SPECIAL PROJECTS.

“I try. If I were really that good, my sabotage at the Follies would have kept you in Intuitionist House. Make you feel safe because I could protect you, where we could keep tabs on you and keep you away from Chancre. I was trying to square things — but you got your own ideas. Independent Lila Mae.” He stops to consider Lila Mae’s satchel. She sees it dawn on him that she might have a gun in there. “Can I ask you something?” he says, wheeling himself back in his chair to be free of the table. “For future reference on my Natchez disguise.”

“Shoot.”

“What made you go to Lift? Did you think the dumb country boy would mess it up, or did you just want to give your new beau a present?”

“I just wanted to help.”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time.”

Just one or two matters left to clear up. The elevator inspector wants to know for sure, even though Lila Mae understands all she needs now. The elevator inspector inquires of the man from Arbo, “What are you going to do about the election tomorrow? You seem to be in a stalemate at this point.”

Coombs watches Lila Mae rub the edge of the satchel; his eyes dart to the doorway behind her and he considers angles, distances. He says, “Chancre’s holding a press conference from his hospital bed tonight. I’m sure he’ll address the Fulton rumors — everyone knows about the black box at this point. But we’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of it.” He braces himself slowly, takes stock of his desk and what implements might come to his aid. “And you, Lila Mae, what are you going to take care of?”

“I have something for you,” she says. She drops it on his desk.

“What’s this?”

“It’s Fulton’s notebook. It’s what you’ve been looking for.”

“Why?”

“I just wanted to help,” she says.

On her way to the elevator, she considers for a moment breaking the glass protecting the small Arbo Excelsior. Carrying it under her arm and setting it down in the stone menagerie outside the building. Freeing it to take its chances in the new city it was never designed for. Into the wild. But it would never survive out there. She kisses the glass instead and walks on.

* * *

What floor?

* * *

How could he have expected them to be ready for it? They can barely make sense of the cities they have now. The ones Otis gave them. They bump into each other going through doors and execute ridiculous pratfalls. He wants to be there now, in the places they will build when they have the perfect elevator. He won’t be there. He knew that as soon as he started to believe in it. He had never allowed himself to believe out of fear. So of course when he started to believe, it was too late. He could only describe what he thought it would look like and give them the means.

It cost him three dollars to get his shoes resoled. He remembers that. Some might find it funny that he’s the one to give it to them. After all they put him through. But he didn’t have a choice, did he? Once he started. He started with a different idea but then the idea got to him and it made him do it differently than how he started. It got under his skin, one might say. Now he’s almost finished, if his body will let him finish. Where was he? Something about the thinner air up there and how to deal with it. He notices he’s written three dollars in the margin of his notebook. He’s always writing things in the margin.

Now that it’s getting warmer outside it is not so cold at night in the library they named after him. Some time ago he stopped wearing anything except his night robe. No one says anything because they consider him a great man and allow him his eccentricities.

He’s thought it through as far as he can see. It will be up to someone else to execute the plan. Maybe the wrong person will come. They’ll think the time is right when the time is actually not right, and that would be terrible. Or they might wait too long. Well, he truly can’t see what evil will come if they wait too long but he would definitely prefer it if whoever comes for it has a good sense of timing. Whoever that is. It might even be one of the students out there on the campus right now, those sleeping know-nothings snug in their elevator dreams. Maybe one of those jerks will find it.

So much corruption in the world today. Oh hell that’s the way it’s always been, old fool. Let it lie. Get back to work. All this work to do. If only he’d started sooner. But he had no way of knowing what he needed to do until he started it.

It’s late. He writes the elevator.

His handwriting has gotten worse since he started. He sees that. It worsens the closer he gets, as if his words are being pinched and pulled by the elevator on the other side of his writing. Like they were being pulled into the future. He can still read it.

He remembers he ran into the Dean this evening on the quad, that self-righteous old clown. Nattering on about his dinner date with some other yahoo they got around here. He asked the Dean if he knew the name of the student exiting the gymnasium, the young colored girl who always walks fast with her head down to the cement. The Dean said her name was Lila Mae Watson and that she was a credit to her race.

He sees her through the window now, as he has for many nights recently. She studies in the small room across from the library. A converted janitor’s closet, if he recalls correctly. Hers is the only light on in the whole building. Just like this light. This light is the only one on in the whole library. She doesn’t look like she eats much. She looks so frail and slight through the window. He wishes she had better sense. But he cannot concern himself with her. The elevator needs tending. He lifts his pen. He notices he has written Lila Mae Watson is the one in the margin of his notebook. That’s right. That’s the name of the only other person awake at this hour of the night. She doesn’t know what she’s in for, he thinks, dismissing her from his mind. He’s always writing things in the margin.

His work summons him. He’s almost done. He has given Marie Claire her instructions and trusts her to carry them out. Someone will come. Someone will take care of it. This thing he’s writing.

Maybe he’ll start bringing the lantern up here at night and use that to work by. It would make the light really dramatic. That would really start people talking.

It works, but they are not ready for it. They will not be ready before his time runs out. He wishes he could be there with them. But he is not for that world. He’s in this one.

* * *

Seven, please.

* * *

Lila Mae has a new room. It’s a good size. Enough room for a desk anyway, and that’s what is important. It looks out on a factory.

She writes a sentence and then scratches it out. Sometimes she almost gets his voice down but then it flutters away and it takes her some time to catch it again. The biggest problem, she finds, is nailing Fulton’s voice as it appears in Volume Three of Theoretical Elevators, as opposed to the arid academic voice of Volume One and the aimless mystic voice of Volume Two. The rhythms of the first two books have been scored into her brain. The optimism of this new book is taking some getting used to. She has to recalibrate. Luckily, she’s just filling in the interstitial parts that Fulton didn’t have time to finish up. She knows his handwriting. The most important parts are there. They just need a little something to make them hang together. Seamlessly.

She stretches in her chair. She likes this new room. They might find it, they might be coming for her once they figure things out. But that won’t be for a while. There’s time to move on and find another room. And there are other cities, none as magnificent as this, but there are other cities. They’re all doomed anyway, she figures. Doomed by what she’s working on. What she will deliver to the world when the time is right.

They are not ready now but they will be.

The elevator in the notebook fragments Marie Claire sent to them is not perfect, but it’s pretty good. After Marie Claire gave her the rest, the former elevator inspector sent them the parts they didn’t have. Once they break Fulton’s code and hieroglyphics, which should take them a long time without the key she possesses, the elevator should hold them for a while. It is not perfect but it’s pretty good. She particularly likes the cab design, which takes care of engineering necessity without sacrificing passenger comfort. Just like they did in the old days. This third volume of Fulton’s truly understands human need, she’s found. The elevator she delivered to Coombs, and then to Chancre and Ben Urich, should hold them for a while. Then one day they will realize it is not perfect. If it is the right time she will give them the perfect elevator. If it is not time she will send out more of Fulton’s words to let them know it is coming. As per his instructions. It is important to let the citizens know it is coming. To let them prepare themselves for the second elevation.

The windows of her room look out on a factory. She likes that. She feels bad for the buildings these days when she sees them. Because they are nothing like what is coming.

She’s the keeper.

Sometimes in the room she thinks about the accident and its message. Much of what happened would have happened anyway, but it warms her to know that the perfect elevator reached out to her and told her she was of its world. That she was a citizen of the city to come and that the frail devices she had devoted her life to were weak and would all fall one day like Number Eleven. All of them, plummeting down the shafts like beautiful dead stars.

Sometimes in her new room she wonders who will decode the elevator first. It could be Arbo. It could be United. It doesn’t matter. Like the election, their petty squabbling feeds the new thing that is coming. In its own way, it prepares them.

She returns to her work. It didn’t have to be her, but it was. Fulton left instructions, but she knows she is permitted to alter them according to circumstances. There was no way Fulton could foresee how the world would change.

She returns to the work. She will make the necessary adjustments. It will come. She is never wrong. It’s her intuition.