The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel

by Helen Phillips

  But she felt bold too, as she sliced the garlic, as she turned on the gas, warmed the kitchen, that soothing smell of boiling pasta. She laid it out, this hard-won dinner, on the battered coffee table. He would be home any second now. She would hand him a beer; he would sink beside her into the stranger’s stained couch. They would eat dinner and then go to the movies or some other normal human activity. She couldn’t wait. She smiled. She stared at the door.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Josephine put the pomegranates in a bowl and placed the bowl on the coffee table across from her, as though it were a dinner companion. She sat among the plants and ate spaghetti and spaghetti and spaghetti until she was full. At long last, a little bit full.

  She called him and left a voice mail. Afterward she was unsure what exactly she had said; it had been at a high volume, that she knew, and had involved a lot of cursing. For a second she felt fantastic, and then she felt dry, thirsty, and lonely.

  She left the sublet, which now reeked of abandonment and dying foliage. The dull dusk had given way to a weird sunset, gray pocked with yellow. Weather for aliens. The temperature had plunged and a fitful wind blew highway dust into her eyes. She thought of the boxes containing her sweaters, her coat. The storage unit—she’d almost forgotten about it. She stood on the stoop of the building, shivered, watched cars travel up the ramp onto the highway. It was hard to believe pomegranates could grow anywhere on this planet.

  She walked. She stepped over a small dead creature on the pavement. She stepped into a bar. At times you have serious doubts about whether you’ve done the right thing.

  As her third cocktail arrived, she thought guiltily of her Puritan ancestors, walking clear-eyed and clean-livered through fresh fields. She pressed her bag against her liver; a honeybee buzzed inside her. You have a great deal of unused veracity. But the wooden bar was so beautiful, glass bottles the colors of precious metals, and now she was shaking hands with joy, hands shaking with joy.

  “What I’ve been worrying about lately—” someone said behind her.

  The bar was filling up. Dark rain falling hard in darkness. She wanted to know what someone had been worrying about lately.

  “—yes, a house of gold, if you can—”

  “—which is the main difference between being—”

  “—three! Seriously, three!”

  Who were all these people?

  At the far end of the bar, a man in a gray sweatshirt drank something stiff. When she lifted her glass to salute him, his smile was maybe sinister, maybe benevolent.

  Security is one of your major goals in life. Stop now. Drink water. Go home. But you become dissatisfied when hemmed in.

  “—so she starts to study all this stuff about marital—”

  Mary tail.

  Martial.

  “—caress!”

  Care ass.

  Carcass.

  “—here alone?”

  It was a long time before she realized this question was addressed to her.

  “No!” The gin added the exclamation point to her response. You desire the company of others. You have found it unwise to feed yourself to others.

  “So, what do you do for work?” the person persisted. Such an uncouth, painful question. A question like tapping on a bruise, pulling at a scab. The wooden stool melted beneath her.

  “Whoa there, lady!”

  She wondered where it was, the beloved voice that would transform “Whoa there, lady” into So some shady. She drifted toward the door on a glowing balloon of laughter and noise. Deep night had arrived. The sky was no longer yellow. She had to pee. She did a magic trick; she floated down the street elevated several inches above the sidewalk. The sidewalk was damp. There were parts of worms in the bottoms of her shoes. She had to pee. Someone grabbed her arm, jerked her back from the intersection. Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Wednesday, Monday, Saturday, Thursday. A laundromat, washers and dryers all filled with bright clothing, but the machines static, not spinning. A gorilla in the driver’s seat of a parked car. A transparent bird, a snagged plastic bag, a woman’s arm vanishing into a brick wall. Three luminous Coca-Cola trucks pulled up to a factory. An aquamarine flicker of tail in the narrow industrial canal; she’d always thought mermaids were limited to salt water. The cruel noise of keys, shoving, twisting, was she at the wrong door in the wrong building on the wrong street in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city in the wrong state in the wrong country on the wrong planet.

  She fell through the doorway onto a couch in a jungle like the lady in the painting. Someone sat in the corner, slowly turning the pages of a book. Everyone knows that only murderers read books in the dark. Thick black hair sprouted from her nipples. She didn’t get invited to Trishiffany’s wedding. At the DMV they x-rayed her brain and discovered there an insurmountable fear of driving. A blind child crossed the street on a radiant tricycle. There was police tape across the door of her office. Some of your respirations are unrealistic. When she asked her parents how long they’d been married, one said A few months and the other said A hundred years. A demon queen perched atop a skyscraper glared out over a brown city.

  Sometime after midnight: wakeful, hot, hungry, bloodshot, regretful, poisoned.

  An insect whizzed near her ear. Bob—bob, went the insect. Bob-bob-bob, increasingly frenetic, enraging her. She flapped at it until it was gone.

  Her bag, twisted on the floor beside the couch; her phone, dark in her bag. She pressed the circle and the screen lit to tell her 2:57.

  And to tell her: one voice mail from Joseph.

  The insect was back. Bob-bob-bob-bob-bobobbobbobbobbob!

  “You little insomniac!” she taunted, swatted.

  The insect dropped dead, tumbled onto her thigh, its legs bent.

  She screamed, then wept. She stood up and went to the bathroom and clung to the sink and threw water at her face.

  The voice mail was ninety-three seconds long. For the first eleven seconds, he was talking. His words were muddied beyond recognition. She couldn’t even get a sense of his tone—urgent or apologetic or calm or excited or nervous or nonchalant. For the next eighty-two seconds, she could hear him moving around. There was maybe the shuffle of papers or the shuffle of phone being returned to pocket, maybe the hiss of a swan or a woman or a heater, the sound of breathing or the sound of walking, click of stapler or plop of pebble into pond, and then, perhaps, a door being slammed, echoing, oceanic, or perhaps thunder, and then another moment of fuzz before the connection was lost.

  She listened to the message three times, harboring hope that the distortion of his words was due to poor reception on her end rather than his, but each time the recording delivered identical indecipherability.

  She called him. He didn’t answer. She called him. He didn’t answer.

  I’m not the one who garnished our meal with glass, Joseph said with an indecipherable smile. The air she breathed in her sleep blackened her lungs, yet her dreams contained snow, they contained forests.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Josephine awoke pregnant.

  It was a lackluster dawn, marks from the couch pressed into her skin like the letters of a strange alphabet. Two of the plants in the jungle were decidedly dead.

  She could feel it inside, clinging; almost hurting. She didn’t know how she hadn’t known until now. The weird hungers, the dizziness. And that irrepressible voice, always twisting her language from within—his wordplay met her unrest, unified now in one being. She placed her hands over her stomach; it was a relief to comfort another living creature. She felt her loneliness lessening retroactively, to know their child had been with her all along.

  “Hello,” she said aloud, shyly.

  Eel ho, the baby replied.

  But “baby” was too tame a word for this vitality. Beast, miniature beast, precious perfect beast just emerged from the blackness of the universe, rich with desires.

  Her heart beat outrageously, like a tin can being slammed again and again with a rock. The divine
, terrifying math.

  1

  2

  4

  8

  16

  32

  64

  128

  256

  512

  1,024

  2,048

  4,096

  8,192

  16,384

  32,768

  65,536

  131,072

  262,144

  524,288

  1,048,576

  2,097,152

  4,194,304

  8,388,608

  16,777,216

  33,554,432

  67,108,864

  134,217,728

  268,435,456

  536,870,912

  1,073,741,824

  2,147,483,648

  There was a twenty-four-hour drugstore down the street. She knew; she didn’t need to take a test. Still, at 6:03 a.m. she was perched on the toilet in the stranger’s apartment, watching the ghostly blue lines appear.

  The joy overmastered the hangover.

  “I am so sorry about the drinks last night,” she muttered, praying she hadn’t ordered a fourth.

  Nast light.

  Gast fright.

  “You!” she cried out, elated.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  By 6:56 a.m., she was in line behind a mother and three children at the only clinic in the neighborhood with early-morning hours. She gripped her health-insurance card in her hand, newly grateful for her job. She could have waited, researched obstetricians, made an appointment at a proper doctor’s office. But instead she’d thrown on sweatpants and torn out of the apartment as soon as she located the clinic in her insurance company’s online directory.

  Because she wanted to start doing the right thing right away. She had been so negligent. She couldn’t wait a day, couldn’t wait eight hours, couldn’t wait two hours for someone official to say it aloud, acknowledge it and make it real. She could only wait four minutes, and then five, six—beginning to twitch with impatience—seven, eight, until 7:04 a.m., at which time a nurse in blue scrubs ambled up to the clinic and unfastened the padlock on the metal grating over the door.

  “Doc’ll be here soon enough,” the nurse said, leading them into the waiting room.

  “My kids got food poisoning or something,” the mother said. “Got chicken nuggets last night and they were all three up all night throwing up their brains.”

  The kids giggled.

  “Doc’ll be here soon.” The nurse gestured toward the plastic chairs lining both sides of the room.

  Josephine sat down across from the mother and the children, who didn’t look like they’d been up all night vomiting. They looked alert, proud to have garnered themselves a trip to somewhere unfamiliar.

  On the wall above the children, there was a poster:

  BE SURE TO EAT THREE HOURS

  BEFORE DONATING BLOOD

  What’s it like to eat three hours? She was feeling impish. How do they taste? Like cotton candy or grass or concrete?

  The youngest child, a girl, ran across the room and deposited a parenting magazine on Josephine’s lap. She spun and ran away, laughing at herself. Josephine smiled at the girl and then at the mother, who didn’t smile back. But the girl returned a moment later and climbed into the chair beside Josephine’s and pointed at the sky on the cover of the magazine and said, “Wha color?”

  “You tell me,” Josephine said.

  “Lellow!” the girl said.

  “Blue,” one of the brothers corrected, watching from across the room.

  Josephine opened the magazine to an ad for all-night diapers. “What color are these?”

  “Lellow!” the girl persisted.

  “White,” the other brother said.

  “What color is this?” Josephine pointed at a photograph of a heart-shaped cookie.

  “Lellow!”

  “Red!” the brothers countered.

  “What color is this?” She pointed at a lemon on a page with a recipe for lemon meringue pie.

  “Lellow!” the girl said victoriously.

  “That’s right!” Josephine said. The girl leaned her head against Josephine’s shoulder for one divine instant before darting back to her real mother, who scooped her up and nuzzled her neck. Josephine felt slightly bereft without the small, warm weight of that head, until she remembered about her own child.

  Eel ho.

  The unmanageable euphoria.

  Manamanamanamama.

  “Josephine Newbury!” the nurse called.

  * * *

  After the paperwork and the blood pressure and the scale and the pee in the cup, she sat in the cubicle on the crinkly paper, waiting. Unable to wait. Her hysterical heartbeat.

  The doctor came through the door, followed by a young nurse in pink scrubs. Josephine clutched the paper beneath her so the women wouldn’t see her quivering hands.

  “Yep,” the doctor said. “You’re a little bit pregnant.”

  Josephine was ecstatic, and then faintly disappointed. She would have given so much for an exclamation point.

  “Isn’t it either you are or you aren’t?” she said.

  “Uh-huh. We just check the levels in the urine.” The doctor sighed. She looked as though she had already given up on the day. “Okay, so find yourself an OB. Blood pressure looks fine. Stay hydrated.”

  “Is that all?” Josephine said. “Don’t you need to examine me?”

  The doctor shook her head. “The body knows what to do.”

  “Oh, thank you!” she said, immediately forgiving the doctor.

  The body knows what to do.

  * * *

  After the nurse followed the doctor out the door, Josephine lingered alone in the fluorescent cubicle. But not alone.

  It all unfurled before her. All the doctors’ appointments to which she would take this precious beast of hers. All the times they would sit together, the two of them, talking or not, in waiting rooms or on trains or at kitchen tables. All the spaces that would someday hold them as this cubicle held them now.

  She was crying.

  Cub icicle.

  Meld then who.

  Eel ho.

  * * *

  Back in the waiting room, the little girl with food poisoning was screeching, trying to twist out of her mother’s grip. The mother was screeching too. “I’m helping you! I’m helping you!”

  The young nurse in pink scrubs sat at the desk. She motioned Josephine over to her with a finger.

  “For you,” she said with a complicit smile as she handed her a pastel-colored plastic bag.

  Josephine seized the bag, the concrete proof, and peered in at a pile of prenatal promotional materials.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, tearing up with gratitude.

  “We get it all for free,” the nurse explained.

  “Still,” Josephine said.

  “Congrats, mamacita!” she replied with a wink.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Josephine stood on the sidewalk outside the clinic, litter and leaves skittering past.

  She wanted to start celebrating somehow, now, right away. She had waited so long. She pulled a pamphlet out of the plastic bag: “Your Growing Baby.”

  At five weeks, your baby is about the size of the tip of a pen. She stared at the illustration: a bulbous blob with no recognizable parts. She tried not to be unnerved.

  “Aren’t you pretty,” she said.

  Pre tie.

  Eat prey.

  She pulled her phone out of her bag and called Joseph, pretending it wouldn’t go straight to voice mail. She didn’t leave a message. She realized she wasn’t lonely. She vowed to do everything she ought to do. She would eat spinach and broccoli and walnuts and pumpkin seeds. She would fatten herself, grow enormous, so that her beast could develop fingernails and teeth, the instruments of savagery. She would provide.

  If she hurried home to change, she could make it to work on time.

  * * *

  Back at the jungle subl
et, she filled a glass with water and immediately drained it. She would take a shower. She would put on her skirt, her cardigan, her shoes. Yes. She would go to work and do what needed to be done.

  In the shower, she soaped her stomach with the greatest tenderness she had ever known.

  She was about to leave for AZ/ZA, her hand on the doorknob, when the doorbell rang. She sprang away from the door, then crept up to it again.

  It was the mailman.

  “Package for Josephine Newbury,” he declared.

  She accepted it: a medium-sized brown box.

  “Signature,” he said, handing her a clipboard.

  She signed beside the “X.”

  “Good thing you were home,” he said. “Final delivery attempt.”

  The box could contain a bomb. The return address was a company in England. She stabbed the tape with a knife, peeled away layers of bubble wrap and tissue paper.

  A cloak coat the color of mist. Cashmere, lined with cream satin on the inside, an oversize white button at the neck. She pressed the garment to her face: the impossible slickness of the satin, the almost imperceptible smell of a goat raised on faraway green hills. Petite in the shoulders, with a hood generous enough to fit a queen’s crown. She had never owned anything this fine.

  She picked up the packing slip. A price so absurd it made her snort. The product description caught her eye. Women’s Winter Dawn Princess-Style Hooded Cashmere Maternity Cloak Coat: the word “Maternity” shocking there amid the other adjectives.

  She flipped the packing slip over.

  The order had been placed by Joseph D. Jones. Of course. The only person on the planet who had known the address of each sublet.

  “Ha!” she said aloud, freed at last from her fear of the postal notice stalker.

  She had never known him to be so optimistic. Or so extravagant. Or so risky. To order such a fancy maternity item before she was even pregnant.