The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel
Page 7
But no. It wasn’t possible. If she happened to be correct, that meant that today a ten-year-old boy named Arturo Benjamin Pesavento—
Art jam save.
“Excuse me?” Josephine whispered.
Ex me accuse.
There was no way she was correct. She was obviously having a profound misunderstanding; a cosmic misunderstanding. Still, she was shaking so hard she could barely hold the pencil with which she was now writing Arturo Pesavento’s full name on a Post-it note. Why was she doing this, what was she going to do with this precious name once she managed to write it legibly?
Leg ably.
Beg lily.
“Hush!” she said out loud, realizing what she had to do, the only way to still her shaking.
* * *
The Pesaventos lived in an old brick row house in a painfully quiet neighborhood bordering the cemetery, the sidewalk out front meticulously swept, the graffiti across the street only mildly offensive. A few slim, troubled trees fought upward from the squares of soil allotted them. The sound of a bouncing ball echoed down the empty block as though it were being dribbled by the last living person on earth, though Josephine didn’t see anyone dribbling a ball.
Arturo Pesavento was sitting on the cement stoop of the house. A plump ten-year-old boy with thick black hair in a bowl cut and a chin sticky with recent Popsicle. He held a portable video game.
She was overjoyed. It had been so easy, to find the address online, to come here, to see him, to reassure herself. She had to stop staring, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.
“What you staring at?” he said, glancing up from his video game.
She was tongue-tied, deluged with relief. She would stand guard here the rest of the day, make sure no truck veered up onto the sidewalk, make sure he went to bed tonight in the same impeccable shape in which she now found him.
“You got a staring problem?” he barked.
“The … trees,” she said. “I’m doing research on the cherry trees.”
“Okay,” he said, relaxing a bit, returning to his video game, “but they’re crapapple trees.”
“Okay,” she said. He looked so healthy, so vibrant, punching away at his little machine, a million miles removed from his death.
“Die, dude!” he muttered victoriously at the screen. “I won,” he informed Josephine, arching his back to crack it.
“And how old are you?” she said, awkwardly.
He seemed to consider not replying.
“Eleven,” he finally said.
“Eleven?” Her throat tightened. “Aren’t you ten?”
He wrinkled his forehead and looked at her.
“No,” he said, almost patient. “I’m eleven.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Perhaps she’d made a mistake with the dates. “I thought you were ten.”
“I’m not ten,” Arturo Pesavento said darkly. “My brother was about to turn ten.”
“Your brother,” she repeated, as the Pesaventos’ home became extra-vivid before her. How had she failed to notice the sagging GET WELL! balloons tied to the window bars, the altar surrounding the miniature blue Virgin cemented into the pavement beside the stoop, the soggy teddy bear and the ribbons and the notes and the soccer trophy? Why hadn’t she wondered why a kid his age wasn’t in school at this hour on a Monday?
Arturo Pesavento’s older brother grabbed his video game and marched up the steps to the front door.
“Go away,” he snapped. “Please!”
As she turned away from the Pesaventos’, a man in a gray sweatshirt strolling down the sidewalk across the street looked over at her and smiled.
FIFTEEN
The cemetery was strangely hot, Indian summer loitering over the graves. Even the marble angel spewing water into the pond looked dehydrated.
And it was hurtfully beautiful: the soft undulating hills like those in the hinterland, the motionless trees, the orderly lawns. Four hundred and seventy-eight acres of grass and death, half a million bodies beneath her feet, her molecules presumably engaged in some sort of exchange with their molecules. The soles of her feet buzzed.
Names, endless names, names given an instant of attention before attention slid elsewhere; a familiar enough sensation for her, to be alone with thousands of names. The headstones glittered in the sun. Acanthus Path, Monarda Path, Spirea Path, Laburnum Path, Woodbine Path.
Lub burn em.
Would bind.
By the time she noticed her thirst, she was already dizzy. She forced herself to the top of a hill and sank down woozily in the shade of a family tomb.
She was going to vomit; she prepared herself; she was ashamed; the feeling subsided. She rested her head against the cool stone.
Fool throne.
She lifted her head back up. What was wrong with her, using a gravestone for a pillow? She wanted to apologize to the dead for her irreverence. She wanted to apologize to herself for apologizing to ghosts who could very well follow her home.
Standing up felt like an act of tremendous will. She walked around to the front of the tomb.
BOOMHAVEN
Boom, haven!
Her haven–tomb; another deathly coincidence, just like the ones she had been so keen to find in the Database.
She wished her last name were Boomhaven. A name for someone who could ferociously defend herself and her loved ones. Josephine Boomhaven, superhero, examined the list detailing the contents of the tomb.
MATTHEW JAMES BOOMHAVEN B. OCTOBER 3, 1872. D. AUGUST 17, 1918.
HARRIET ROSE BOOMHAVEN B. JANUARY 11, 1876. D. JUNE 27, 1942.
EDITH ROSE BOOMHAVEN B. MAY 18, 1899. D. MAY 18, 1899.
She reached out to touch MAY 18, 1899 and MAY 18, 1899. The engraved lines chilled her fingertips.
BDBDBD.
DBDBDB.
She refused to think about the child, its brief brush with life, the forty-three bereaved years that must have followed, the number of decades it had been since anyone had taken note of the fugitive existence of EDITH ROSE BOOMHAVEN.
Dearth rose boo have.
Instead, she unzipped her bag and looked inside for something to write on. The only paper she could find was a receipt from the Four-Star Diner. Carefully, she copied down the full names, the “B” dates, the “D” dates.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a plan.
Once she had finished writing it all out, she folded the receipt, placed it in her wallet, stood up, strode down the hill. Wintergreen Path, Yew Path, Hill Path, Mahonia Path, Prim Path.
Then, a double headstone: J NEWBURY, twice.
She resisted, but the magnetic letters won, pulling her off Vernal Path.
Upon closer inspection, it proved to be JANE LOUISE NEWBURY and JONATHAN PHILIP NEWBURY. They shared a burial date: NOVEMBER 4, 1870.
A couple together burning in bed, a couple together pocked with plague. The indifferent sun. Sunburn blossomed on her hot cheeks. A headache blotted her vision red. She staggered lost among the graves until she reached the black wrought-iron fence. On the other side of the fence, people strolled and children licked cones. The miraculous ice cream truck. She walked alongside the fence, clinging to its bars, hoping for a gate.
The smells of the world assailed her—grass rotting, dogs peeing—yet even so a monstrous hunger rose within her. She needed ice cream, cottage cheese, chocolate, rice, milk, licorice.
SIXTEEN
She knew he wouldn’t be in the cellar when she returned. She knew the rooms would be sunk in shadows, the bathtub haunted, and she would sit in the dark the whole night, starving alone. Her joints ached, or maybe it was her brain. She limped up the block toward the sublet.
He was there. The lamps were on. Something steamed on the stove. She stood in the doorway in disbelief.
He came over to her. He smiled the smile of someone who didn’t spend his days typing death dates into a database. He relieved her of her bag.
“You look like you need a hug,” he said.
“I got you something,” he said. She wanted to cry out when he pulled away from her.
He went to the fridge and returned with a Coca-Cola in a bottle. Coca-Cola in a bottle was one of her favorite things. He twisted the cap off with the bottom of his T-shirt and handed it to her. He was good as gold, good as ever. She drank hard, the carbonation burning her throat.
That you could have a need; that someone could bring you something to fulfill this need.
He reminded her of a funny story from their past involving an old friend, someone mistaking vodka for water, connected to a later story in which Joseph disguised Guinness in a Coca-Cola bottle; you had to be there. She was shocked by her laughter. She stroked the cool perfect lines of the Coca-Cola bottle.
Oca ola otto.
“I hate my job,” she allowed herself to say, as though she meant it in the way people usually mean it. “You hate yours too, right?” Misery loves company.
“It’s boring,” he said. “But it’s great, in a way.”
She was not in the mood for him to elaborate.
* * *
Later, they sat on the couch, eating carrots. She leaned her head against his skull while he chewed. She listened to his jaw moving. She liked to hear the sounds of his skeleton.
SEVENTEEN
Alone in the ungenerous light of the elevator on Tuesday morning, Josephine pressed the DOOR OPEN button again and again. The elevator had stopped on the second floor, as per her request, but now refused to release her. Instead, it began to rise at its stately, maddening pace. It stopped inexplicably on the eighth floor, the tenth floor. The doors remained sealed. The elevator then descended, stopping on the seventh floor, where the doors opened into the desolation of an empty hall. On the way down to the basement and on the way back up to the tenth floor, Josephine attempted to exit on floor two.
The even floors, she realized, were all locked. The File Storage floors. The floors with the dusty bathrooms that Trishiffany had maligned within minutes of meeting her. Like the floor she had tried and failed to access in her search for the vending machine.
Tucked into her bra, damp with her anxious sweat, the Four-Star Diner receipt bearing the names and dates of the Boomhavens.
She was operating under the uncertain assumption that the second floor should contain file storage for the earliest letters in the alphabet. But the second floor continued to elude her. She rode the elevator up and down, up and down, up and down. She had arrived before business hours, but now business hours had begun. Occasionally other bureaucrats joined her on her upward journey; all exited on odd floors.
She knew the gray files were mounting in her office, beginning to bury her desk.
A bureaucrat with papery skin and flat eyes boarded the elevator, pressed the 2, and swiped a card across a keypad that Josephine had neglected to notice. The elevator doors, now cordial, opened onto the second floor. The zombie bureaucrat headed down the fluorescent hallway, unaware of her.
A surge of joy, a surge of panic; Josephine rushed out of the elevator. This could have been the ninth floor or any floor—the same concrete, the same metal doors. But these doors, unlike most, bore labels: small typewritten signs taped just above the handles.
She felt so victorious, so shrewd, when she saw that the first door read AA–AE: correct, finally.
AAAE.
AEEI.
EIEIO!
She wanted to jog down the hall, but she made herself walk the bureaucrat’s walk, the weighted scurry.
Easier than she could have dreamed: Here it was, the door labeled BL–BR. First she tested the handle—not locked. She braced herself, shoved her body against the door, tumbled into the room when it slid smoothly open.
Blushing, she closed the door behind her and turned to confront File Storage BL–BR. The room was unlit, murky. She’d gone three steps when a light clicked on. She froze; then realized the light was controlled by an automatic sensor. Now a single pale bulb in a wire cage illuminated a tiny fraction of the room. It seemed impossible that such a cavernous space could lie behind a door identical to the one that led into her office. Aisles of metal shelves loaded with boxes of gray files stretched upward toward an unseen ceiling.
Josephine stepped into the first aisle. A second light clicked on, startling her briefly, followed by a third, a fourth, as she passed boxes of files labeled with multi-letter combinations. It was uneasily warm, dense with dust. She walked down the aisle, moving from lightbulb to lightbulb. Vast rows of BLAs, aisles and aisles of them, and then the BOAs (the BMs and BNs a blip), the BOBs, the BOCs. Finally she gave in and ran, lightbulbs snapping on to keep pace.
And here she was. The BOOs. The BOOMs.
Boo.
Boom.
Boomshakalaka.
Once again, exceptional good luck: The BOOMH box was not on one of the impossible shelves, those that receded away into the great dimness. It was on a shelf almost but not quite out of her reach. She stretched toward it. She felt vigorous, powerful, in possession of abundant inner resources. She engaged all the muscles in her arms; she placed the box on the floor.
These gray files were like all the gray files she had known in this place. As she flipped through the box, a file sliced her ring finger, but she paid no mind to the slender line of blood.
Here they were, her three BOOMHAVENS, the only three, right in front of the BOOMHOWERS. She was trembling.
Matthew James Boomhaven. Harriet Rose Boomhaven. Edith Rose Boomhaven.
She pulled the three files, spread them open on the unfinished floor. She reached into her bra for the receipt. The form hadn’t changed. There they were, the typewritten dates, the “D” at the top right, the “G” ending the second row, just as she had feared: D08171918, G10031872. D06271942, G01111876. D05181899, G05181899.
She closed her eyes and knelt before the files in understanding, in grief. She felt her fantastic strength draining away.
When she reopened her eyes, she inched toward Edith’s file, which she noticed bore only a small fraction of the chaotic text customary for the fifth line of the form: S*(8X&^P=+/–. Edith, never-more-than-newborn; Edith, whose life ceased within twenty-four hours of her birth.
Josephine rested her mournful eyes at the end of Edith’s third line, the line that began P/G01221872 and ended D08171918.
That 08171918 itched at her for a sluggish, stupid moment, until she recognized its source. Alert again, she examined the fourth line of Edith’s form, which began M/G04151875 and ended D06271942.
It was obvious now. Paternal death date. Maternal death date.
She wanted the first date on the third and fourth lines of Edith’s paperwork to be her parents’ birth dates; she craved that tidiness. But now she would figure out for certain what those dates meant—she would scrutinize these godforsaken pages forever until she understood everything.
Then, the sound of someone walking, the sharp noise of shoes coming across the massive aisles toward her, caged lightbulbs clicking on accordingly.
She stopped breathing, didn’t dare shift the form in her hand lest even that minuscule noise give her away.
EIGHTEEN
“Jojo doll,” Trishiffany said, rounding the corner in a fuchsia suit with matching stilettos. Her eyes were more bloodshot than ever. “You so shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s you!” Josephine said, relieved.
“You look terrible, Jojo,” she said. “What’s wrong, doll? Your eyes! So bloodshot!”
“I realized what I do here,” Josephine said, gesturing outward at the complex as a whole.
She hoped Trishiffany would probe into this declaration, would tell her that she was mistaken, that she’d misunderstood everything (silly
Jojo!), that she wasn’t the bureaucrat queen of death dates.
Instead, Trishiffany nodded.
“Of course you did, doll. You’re plenty smart. It was only a matter of time.”
“I refuse.”
Free use.
Fuse re.
“Yes, we all have that moment. But if you don’t do it, Jojo doll, someone else will.” Trishiffany leaned against the metal shelf and rested her cheek on a box of BOOs. “You’re very good at your job. Very precise, very discreet. You can do it with more compassion than others might. In the town where I grew up, the man who owned the funeral parlor gave a lollipop to every child who passed by.”
The lightbulb glared down on both pairs of bloodshot eyes.
“Anyway, sometimes you get to see nice things happen,” Trishiffany continued. “Remember Viola Pink Olguin? Alive and well. Thirty-three years old. The chemo worked, the car didn’t skid, who knows. But bless her.”
“I can’t do it.” Josephine coughed; the dust.
“You’re not doing anything, Jojo doll. You’re just inputting data. Keeping things up to date. That’s all.”
“So who picks the dates?” Josephine demanded.
“Things get closed out when the time comes for them to get closed out. The same fifty-seven thousand or so people die in this city each year, the same fifty-five million or so die on the planet each year, Josephine Newbury or no.”
Josephine became aware of her own teeth chattering.
“Don’t you mainly just want to have a good life with your husband and kid where you don’t have to worry about being unemployed?”
“I don’t have a kid,” Josephine said bitterly.
“There’s two days’ worth of files drowning your desk right now.” Her words were severe but her voice was serene. “I highly recommend that you hightail it to 9997 and deal with that situation.”
Trishiffany met Josephine’s cold gaze, her eyes warm with sympathy; was that the sheen of tears?