The Intuitionist

Lila Mae Watson is an elevator inspector living in an alternate version of mid-century New York City. In this reality, there is a pervasive and cult-like fascination with elevators, given that they enabled the construction of skyscrapers and the modern city. By extension, elevator inspectors occupy a special place in society, for it is their stamp of approval that signifies whether an elevator is safe or not. Lila Mae is the city’s second Black elevator inspector and the first to be a Black woman.

There are two competing schools of thought within elevator inspection. Most inspectors are “Empiricists” who take a traditional approach to inspection, examining cable wires and measuring response times. Inspectors like Lila Mae are “Intuitionists” who feel and visualize an elevator’s vibrations to determine its safety. For reasons no one can explain, Intuitionists have a slightly better safety record than Empiricists.

As Lila Mae waits to inspect an elevator at 125 Walker, the superintendent finally arrives. He makes little effort to hide his dissatisfaction that a Black woman is inspecting his building’s elevator. After riding the elevator and visualizing its vibrations in complex geometric shapes, Lila Mae determines that she must cite the building for a “faulty overspeed governor.”

In her car on the way back to headquarters, Lila Mae hears the dispatcher report that an elevator has fallen at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building—an elevator Lila Mae recently inspected and evaluated as safe. The building is named for an enslaved woman in the antebellum South who taught herself to read and escaped to the North. Lila Mae’s boss, Frank Chancre, is up for reelection as President of the Elevator Guild, and she assumes that he assigned her the Fanny Briggs building to make the guild seem forward-thinking and progressive in a city where Black people are increasingly campaigning for equal rights.

In the basement of headquarters, a mechanic tips Lila Mae off that the department plans to blame her for the accident. Rather than go upstairs to report in, Lila Mae walks to a nearby bar where some of her inspector colleagues are listening to Chancre and the Mayor give a press conference on the radio. There, she meets Chuck, a Jewish escalator enthusiast whom she calls her “one friend in the Department” (20). Also at the bar is Pompey, the first Black elevator inspector and presently the only one other than Lily Mae. Lily Mae views Pompey as too eager to accept the humiliations he suffers as the first Black inspector. In turn, Pompey holds Lily Mae in equal contempt, though she can only guess at the reasons. As the press conference continues, Lila Mae realizes that the accident will be blamed on her because she is an Intuitionist, and so is Chancre’s opponent in the Guild election, Orville Lever.

From Chuck, Lila Mae learns that an empty Fanny Briggs elevator went into a total freefall. No one was hurt, but the incident occurred while the Mayor was showing off the building to some foreign dignitaries. Lila Mae immediately assumes foul play; she did her job and, aside from that, a total freefall hasn’t happened in the United States in decades. Chuck tells her to report back to the office to meet with Internal Affairs, but she refuses, adding, “[T]his isn’t a standard accident” (36).

Instead, Lila Mae goes home where she discovers two men, Jim and John, searching her small apartment for incriminating evidence. She asks for identification, knowing that Internal Affairs agents do not have the authority to enter apartments without a warrant. Jim and John refuse, but before the situation escalates, Orville Lever’s secretary, Mr. Reed, appears from behind Lila Mae and insists that the men leave; they begrudgingly comply.

Once they are alone, Mr. Reed explains that Lila Mae has been set up by Chancre’s people, and that he is there to bring her to Lever’s headquarters for her protection. Although she feels she needs no protection, she complies with Mr. Reed’s wishes.

In an interlude, Lila Mae recalls late nights studying for her elevator inspector degree at the Institute for Vertical Transport. On many nights, she would look out her window and see a light turn on at Fulton Hall, a library named for James Fulton. Fulton was a luminary in the field of elevator inspection and the inventor of Intuitionism, the principles of which he laid out in a series of books called Theoretical Elevators. One night, the figure waved to Lila Mae, and she made no response. The next morning, when his body was discovered after he died of natural causes, Lila Mae learned that the figure was James Fulton himself, elderly and on the brink of death, but still passing his time in the stacks of the library named for him.

Back in the present, Lila Mae wakes up in a bed at Intuition House, a center dedicated to the study of Intuitionism which doubles as Lever’s campaign headquarters. A handsome Black porter named Natchez is there with a plate of breakfast when she wakes. After he leaves, Lila Mae puts on her suit and—just as importantly—her face: “In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard? It took practice” (57).

Lila Mae meets Mr. Reed in the garden. He tells her that the fight between Chancre and Lever has grown even more intense thanks to a package Lever received in the mail containing torn-out entries from Fulton’s hidden journal. The entries describe the completion of the much-rumored “black box”—a “perfect elevator” Fulton constructed according to Intuitionist principles. The emergence of such an elevator would crush Chancre and his Empiricist allies, hence why Mr. Reed believes Chancre orchestrated an incident that would embarrass the Intuitionists. Mr. Reed adds that the men at her apartment were henchmen belonging to Johnny Shush, a mob boss aligned with Chancre.