The Intuitionist by Whitehead Colson Read Free Book Online Page A

mother, skinny and quiet. The denuded light and sad lethargy of the tableau says late summer: the cold months are coming. Lila Mae seems comfortable with this knowledge. Hers is essentially a sad face, inward-tending and declivitous, a face that draws the unwary into the slope of its melancholy. Something in the bones, and inherited, John decides after an appraisal of her mother. Children are doomed to reiterate the mistakes in their parents’ physiognomies, as if trapped by curses that mark generations and wait for unknowable acts of atonement. Jim’s parents are obviously close kin, and if you ask him he won’t deny it.
    At one point she got a bird, but it died.
    John notices Jim rubbing his jaw. “Tooth still hurting you?” he asks.
    Jim nods solemnly.
    “You better go to the dentist tomorrow,” John advises. “No use walking around in pain if you don’t have to be.”
    John discovers Lila Mae’s books in a ziggurat stack beneath the end table. They’re all work books, the standard texts: Zither’s
An Introduction to Counterweights, Elisha Otis: The Man and His Times
and so on. She has all of Fulton’s books, from the groundbreaking
Towards a System of Vertical Transport
, to the more blasphemous parts of his oeuvre,
Theoretical Elevators
Volumes One and Two. So far their information has been correct, as it always is.
    “Looks like a real blue-ribbon type,” John decides, flipping through
Guidebook to Elevator Safety
for incriminating papers.
    “You always call ’em,” Jim says.
    “She’s got all the right books.”
    “You always call ’em,” Jim says.
    Jim and John are neat ransackers. When their cases return to their homes, they suffer only the vaguest sense of loss, a nagging perplexity, and with so many other possible causes of that sense ofloss, few suspect that these two men have been pawing their things. John sees himself as a crucial gear in the city’s mechanism, a freelance poltergeist of metropolitan disquiet. Jim and John’s employers are proud of them, and when they receive their briefing on tonight’s activities, Jim and John will not be reprimanded for failure. The particular organization they work for can afford to forgive, as long as that forgiveness is tracked and tabulated like absenteeism, pencil theft, fire damage (accident, insurance fraud), and at the end of each quarter, the books tally.
    What Jim and John are missing is the safe behind the somber painting of haystacks. Where she keeps all of her important things. Perhaps John would have found the safe eventually if Lila Mae hadn’t disturbed their search. It takes her a few attempts to realize that the reason she can’t unlock her door is because it is already unlocked. Jim and John do not take the time allowed by Lila Mae’s clicking and fumbling to clamber down the fire escape, or hide in the closet, or pull out their guns and recline on Lila Mae’s couch in a rather labored we’ve-got-you-covered pose, no, they continue to shake the joint down and that’s how Lila Mae finds them, John scrutinizing a pile of receipts from the middle left hand drawer of Lila Mae’s sad afterthought of a kitchenette—you never know what notations can be encrypted into a seemingly innocuous phrase such as “Bob’s Grocery: A Place to Shop” or in the numerical fortress of “prices” and “taxes”—and Jim scraping a finger through the jar of peach preserves Lila Mae received last Christmas from her mother’s sister, checking for little treasures like bus station locker keys and microfilm, microfilm, which Jim has never encountered in all his searches through so many apartments, but will one day, he’s sure of it. That’s how Lila Mae finds them, John peering, one big eye, through a magnifying glass and Jim licking his fingers. Given obscenity’s remarkable gallop into conversational speech, colorful epithets are to be expected in Lila Mae’s address to the two strangers lurking about her apartment.But it is John who is