Colson Whitehead

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

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

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

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

The man enters the car on the first floor and declares, “Department of Elevator Inspectors.” He flips open the badge, that gold nova, to the agitated wives, who suddenly see their afternoon assignation get complicated. “Everybody out.” He is authority… 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.