44 pages • 1 hour read
The Intuitionist
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Beta“Down,” Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Down,” Part 2 Summary
Ben Urich is a reporter for Lift magazine, a trade journal devoted to the elevator industry. Like Lever, he received torn-out pages from Fulton’s journal in the mail, and he has written a story on the Intuitionist-based black box that is set to run in a couple days. Late at night, Urich goes to the office to pick up an advance copy of the new issue but is shocked to see that his story has been killed. As he tries to call his editor on a payphone, Jim and John, who say they are Johnny Shush’s men, grab him and throw him into the backseat of their car. They tell him to back off the black box story and proceed to break each of his fingers.
Meanwhile, one of Lever’s chauffeurs drives Lila Mae to the Institute for Vertical Transport grounds to meet Mrs. Marie Claire Rogers, Fulton’s former maid and caretaker. She looked after Fulton after the Institute’s Board of Directors pressured him to resign as Dean, following a period marked by what they deemed to be “eccentric” behavior. In his will, Fulton stipulated that Mrs. Rogers could stay in his on-campus home for as long as she likes, evidence which suggests to Lila Mae that the two were lovers. Mr. Reed believes Mrs. Rogers is the one who sent the pages of Fulton’s journal, and he hopes she has the rest of the pages. He is also frank about why he chose Lila Mae to meet Mrs. Rogers in an attempt to recover the lost journals: Both women are Black.
Inside Mrs. Rogers’s home, Lila Mae makes conversation, asking questions she already knows the answer to. But when it comes to the journals, Mrs. Rogers continues to insist she gave them all to the Institute after Fulton’s death. When Lila Mae insists that it’s important that they recover the journals, Mrs. Rogers responds, “To who? To you or them?” (94).
Outside, Lila Mae enters the chauffeur’s car, only to notice too late that both the car and chauffeur are different. As she sits in the car, she recalls one of Fulton’s thought experiments from the Institute: the Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger. It posits that the elevator does not exist when it is not in use. If a person calls an elevator but changes their mind, the elevator remains in its state of “eternal quiescence” because there is no “expectation of freight” (101).
The car arrives at a dilapidated warehouse. On the way down to a basement room, Lila Mae passes a bloodied, screaming man with broken fingers, implied to be Urich. After a long wait in a square interrogation room, Chancre enters. After some faux-genial attempts at small talk, Chancre asks Lila Mae if she has Fulton’s journals. She accuses Chancre of paying Pompey to sabotage the Fanny Briggs elevator. Chancre denies this, explaining that he already has the Guild election secured and that he only wants to know where the journals are. Moreover, if their plan was to set Lila Mae up, they would have planted incriminating evidence in her apartment, rather than wait until the incident already happened before searching it.
Convinced that Lila Mae doesn’t have the black box blueprints already, Chancre makes a simple offer: She should try her best to find the journals and, when she does, give them to Chancre instead of Lever. He goes on to explain that while he supports the advancement of “your people” (115), Lila Mae should know that if she refuses to play ball, nobody will care what happens to her because of her race, using a racist slur in his threat. Privately, Lila Mae thinks that Chancre is a fool if he thinks she is loyal to Reed and Lever: “Her loyalty is to Fulton” (121). Chancre lets her go.
Meanwhile, Chuck is informally interrogated by Internal Affairs agent Bart Arbergast about the Fanny Briggs incident. He says the cable snapped and the antilock brakes never kicked in—two extraordinarily rare occurrences that suggest sabotage. Yet, while Arbergast doubts Lila Mae is responsible given her lack of a motive, she was the last person to come into contact with the elevator’s machinery, making her his only plausible suspect.
When Lila returns to her apartment, it is trashed in a manner she believes is inconsistent with Chancre and Shush’s more meticulous methods. No matter how many times her place is searched, the assailants never discover the safe behind a painting, where she keeps her diploma from the Institute and a prizewinning paper on theoretical elevators: “She thinks, these white men see her as a threat but refuse to make her a threat, cunning, duplicitous. They see her as a mule, ferrying information back and forth, not clever or curious enough to explore the contents. Brute. Black” (122).
The next day, Lila Mae returns to Intuition House where Natchez greets her. He escorts her to see Mr. Reed and Lever; rather than explain her abduction, Lila Mae says she decided to stay late at the Institute and explore her old stomping grounds. Clearly annoyed by this, Mr. Reed insists that she stay hidden at Intuition House, particularly if she continues to refuse to check in with Internal Affairs. Feeling as though she is in a prison, Lila Mae walks to the room prepared for her. On the way, Natchez stops her and says he needs to speak with her later.
Close to midnight, Natchez knocks on Lila Mae’s door. He confirms her suspicions that it was Mr. Reed, worrying that Lila Mae cut a deal with Chancre, who had her room torn apart. In his explanation, Natchez mentions the black box. Lila Mae asks, “What do you know about the black box?”—to which Natchez replies, “I know a lot about it. Fulton was my uncle” (133).
Here, there is an interlude told from the third-person limited perspective of Fulton as a child. It is strongly implied that Fulton was conceived when a white man raped his Black mother. Fulton is very light-skinned and is frequently mistaken for white.
Back in the present, Natchez shows Lila Mae a family picture of his mother, grandmother, and uncle, a teenager who looks a great deal like Fulton. Natchez’s mother told him her brother that Fulton ran away from home when he was 16. Lila Mae is certain the young man in the photo is Fulton. Natchez goes on to say that he tricked his way into the employ of Intuition House because he wants the black box: “It’s my birthright” (138).
Lila Mae considers the ramifications of this revelation. She wonders how Fulton behaved when alone with white people: “Fulton a spy in white spaces, just like she is. But they are not alike. She’s colored” (139).
“Down,” Part 2 Analysis
In Part 2 of “Down,” there is an even greater reliance on pulpy detective novel tropes than in Part 1. Whitehead signals this with the reemergence of Jim and John, who throw Urich into a car and break his fingers. Although Whitehead delivers the scene with a measure of detachment and even humor, he later undercuts the fun, pulpy vibe by portraying a man heavily implied to be Urich screaming in pain at Shush’s warehouse of horrors. The book frequently teeters on this tense wire between the titillating conventions of detective novels and the horrifying nature of violence as it exists in the real world. This adds extraordinary suspense to the scene in which Lila Mae herself is kidnapped by henchmen. The reader wonders: If the henchmen are ready to torture and maim a white male journalist, what might they be willing to do to a Black woman like Lila Mae—a particularly urgent question given the threats of racialized violence that lay uncomfortably under all of Lila Mae’s travels through white spaces.
As the protagonist of this detective yarn, Lila Mae also serves as a commentary on the genre. Like many detective protagonists, from The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade to Raymond Chandler’s iconic Philip Marlowe, Lila Mae is an outsider and a loner. These characters put the “private” in “private detective,” having maintained only loose ties to institutions or individuals—ties that are severed at a moment’s notice in pursuit of the truth.
Yet, unlike the usually white, male heroes of detective fiction, who tend to be outsiders by choice or by temperament, Lila is made an outsider by racial otherization. This otherization—dismissive at best and actively hostile at worst—largely manifests in personal interactions in the previous section, depicted to illustrate Lila Mae’s double consciousness. Here, they are more deeply rooted in the detective plot; for example, Mr. Reed can think of no other use for a woman with Lila’s intelligence and spiritual connection to Fulton than to have her talk to Mrs. Rogers, simply because they are both Black. The tendency to underestimate Lila Mae is shared by Chancre, who can see her as nothing but Reed and Lever’s pawn, to whom he falsely assumes she is implicitly loyal. While many detective heroes play two sides against each other, Lila Mae doesn’t need to: The two sides play themselves because of their racial biases against Lila Mae as a Black woman.
This section also deepens the discussion of elevators in metaphysical terms. In a flashback, Lila Mae recalls “The Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger.” It is a variation of the thought experiment, “If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear, does it make a sound?” In this formulation, the question posed is, “If an elevator arrives and there is no passenger there to board it, does the elevator still exist?” Expanding on the metaphor of the elevator as a vehicle for racial uplift, this suggests that racial uplift only exists on an individual, case-by-case basis, rather than as a reliable concept which exists independent of potential beneficiaries. Like uplift, the elevator is merely a dream in the absence of a rider, and this acknowledgment is perhaps why Intuitionists like Lila Mae—who rely on feel and visualizations projected onto the back of their eyelids rather than mechanics—tend to understand more keenly the elevator and its potential to fail, regularly performing at a ten percent higher success rate than their Empiricist competitors.
Finally, this section introduces the reveal that Fulton was a white-passing Black man. The full implications of this discovery will not be fully explored until the two later sections, but for now it poses a point of comparison between Lila Mae’s experience of double consciousness and Fulton’s. Given their entrenchment in white professional and academic communities, both characters struggle to reconcile the person they see themselves as and the person white people see them as. Yet because Fulton passes as white, his navigation of white spaces is at once easier and more fraught than Lila Mae’s. While Lila Mae must face a near-constant barrage of indignities and frequent threats to her safety, Fulton can move with little friction through both formal and informal white spaces without being attacked physically or emotionally.
The image Fulton projects to the world is also fundamentally a lie, complicating his experience of double consciousness even further. This is somewhat true for Lila Mae—she describes putting on “her face” before entering white spaces, a pose of toughness she says hides her sadness. Yet as Lila Mae later discovers, putting on that face makes her no more “seen” by the world of white men than if she left it off, while Fulton enjoys both the privilege and the peril of being “seen.”
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