The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel

by Helen Phillips

  “Jesus Christ, sugarplum,” Hillary said. “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay.”

  A cold napkin passed over Josephine’s eyelids, cheek, chin. When had she ever known such kindness. She dared to open her eyes.

  “I have this job,” she said.

  “Okay,” Hillary said, waiting.

  “I receive the files of people who are about to die,” she continued flatly. “I input their death dates into a database.”

  She looked at Hillary, awaiting her reaction. Disbelief or horror or mirth?

  “The summer I was eighteen,” Hillary said, equally flat, “I worked in a photo-development lab. People would drop their film off at the local pharmacy and it would be sent to us to make prints. My main job was to monitor the strips of photos as they rolled out onto the drying drum and then cut them into individual pictures. I saw the craziest things. I saw my best friend’s father in a motel room with a woman I didn’t recognize. I saw cunnilingus and fellatio, though at the time I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. I saw dead children in caskets surrounded by their brothers and sisters.”

  Hillary paused. Josephine craved her voice.

  “But the worst was the film the soldiers sent back to their families to get developed in the States.”

  She paused again.

  “That was the worst,” she concluded.

  Josephine pulled the file out of her bag and set it on the bench between them. It looked innocuous and flimsy, just a plain gray folder; inside her bag it had felt so hot, magnetic.

  “This is my husband’s file,” she whispered. “I stole it.”

  She opened the file and pointed at the death date.

  “You poor thing,” Hillary said, staring shamelessly at her.

  “What, you think I’m crazy?” Josephine said.

  “Look, I’m crazy for my hub,” Hillary said. “His last name is Tillary, can you believe it? So when I married him, that was the genesis of Hillary Tillary. Isn’t that just the kind of coincidence that makes the world go round?”

  “He didn’t even come home last night!” Josephine admitted under her breath.

  “Oh, that,” Hillary said. “I know all about guys not coming home.”

  Wounded, Josephine looked down at her hand. Her untended nail, her inelegant finger, pressing against his death date.

  “You know, I always have great advice to give,” Hillary said. “People always come here to get advice from me. I pride myself on that.”

  Josephine looked up at her, suddenly hopeful.

  “But in this case, in this particular situation, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any advice at all.” She squeezed Josephine’s hand. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Excuse me,” Josephine mumbled, standing up and trying to push her way past Hillary, but the corner of her cloak was stuck in the seam of the booth, trapping her. A terrible exhaustion, a terrible nausea, overcame her.

  She sank back down.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” she confessed, longing for the beast to scramble her words, but it kept quiet.

  Hillary slipped out of the booth and returned swiftly with a pitcher of ice water and a glass.

  “There, there, dear. Drink up.…”

  Josephine tossed her head back and tried to drink down the queasiness.

  “… someday this, whatever it is, will all seem like it happened to someone—oh, wait a sec, wait a sec! Shoot, I should have known right away! I can always see it in a girl’s face! Look, I don’t even know your name, but I think you are the cutest little sugarplum mama! I’m right, right?”

  “I took the test this morning. And went to the doctor.” Josephine was surprised to feel herself glowing. It was wonderful to have someone else know. “And then the postman delivered this maternity cloak!”

  “The world sure works in ways, doesn’t it?” Hillary said. “If that isn’t just the chicest little maternity coat I ever have seen.”

  “My husband special-ordered it from England,” she said proudly, momentarily forgetting that she might never see him again. “It’s funny, but he placed the order before the baby was even conceived.”

  “Well he must have known!” Hillary said with conviction.

  “He’s just hopeful,” she countered, though hopefulness was not a trait she had ever associated with Joseph. “How could he have known?”

  “Hey, didn’t you just tell me you know before people are going to die?” Hillary lifted the pitcher and poured more water into Josephine’s glass.

  And then there it was, the obvious, miraculous thing: the unreliable cellular connection. The shuffle of papers, the hiss of a heater, the oceanic echo of a door slammed in a corridor. Her small cell of an office balanced on a seesaw with an office at the other end of the endless hallway, the place where the opposite operation must occur. And in that office, a person behind a desk. A very particular person.

  * * *

  A hand stretched over the top of the booth and yanked Josephine’s hair hard. Stunned, she gasped and twisted around, knowing it would be The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt or some other minion, capturing her now that she had finally hit upon something essential about AZ/ZA.

  But the culprit was a toddler, a splendid kid with a grin as big and round as a Ping-Pong ball. Josephine reversed her grimace. The mother smiled apologetically and scolded her child in a watery language that Josephine didn’t recognize.

  “You have kid?” the gentle-eyed mother asked.

  She didn’t know the correct answer to that question. The child reached out familiarly and pulled on her nose.

  “Hello there, you,” Josephine said.

  THIRTY-ONE

  She burst out of the Four-Star Diner into an afternoon so unabashedly golden it was hard to believe anyone anywhere had ever faced a problem. The sun was still high, as though this day were going to last forever and forever.

  Running back the way she had come, Josephine discovered that her vision was no longer glazed by the blank stare. Now the world overwhelmed her with its precision: the sheen of a little boy’s toy frog, the texture of a woman’s violin case, the thickness of a man’s felt hat. Her cloak a wing. Dazzled, she ran.

  * * *

  She was six blocks from her destination when she noticed The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt coming down the sidewalk toward her. His sweatshirt as gray as the file in her bag. It was only the two of them, no other pedestrians in sight. A sense of doom arose in her. She tried to run like a woman out for a casual jog, notwithstanding her unsuitable clothing, her flapping bag. Right as they were passing each other, she happened to sneeze.

  “Bless you,” The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt said, said it like he meant it, like an actual blessing. She wondered if perhaps they were just two very polite passersby. His face bore a look of benevolent indifference: the look of a man in a gray sweatshirt out for a walk on a fine October afternoon. He didn’t reach out to grab her, didn’t rip her bag off her shoulder.

  Still, she couldn’t bring herself to say “thank you.” Instead, she raced onward, eager to put distance between herself and The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt.

  Ahead of her, the concrete compound gleamed poisonous in the late sunlight.

  * * *

  Here it was, the doorway labeled “Z,” her first and only point of entry into the compound. She ran past it, farther down the block than she had ever ventured, to the next entrance, with its identical metal door: “Y.”

  Of course. She felt a lick of hope; now she knew what she was looking for.

  This had to be the longest block in the city, and maybe the world. She was now closer to Joseph’s subway station than to hers.

  * * *

  She stood before “A,” looking upward.

  THIRTY-TWO

  No alarm sounded when Josephine passed through the door labeled “A.” The hallway she entered was indistinguishable from every hallway she had ever seen in “Z.” She paused, glanced to her right and left: the metal doors, the fluorescence, the sound
of cockroaches marching. At the far end of the hall, a bureaucrat scurried from one door to another. The sight spurred her into motion. Stillness was dangerous; a real bureaucrat never pauses. She scurried in the other direction. When she reached an EMERGENCY EXIT door, she pressed through it into the deep silence of the stairwell. As in “Z,” the concrete steps led upward with no end in sight. Downward, though, she could see that the steps ended in the basement.

  The basement.

  If her job took place on an upper floor of “Z,” couldn’t the reverse job take place in the basement of “A”?

  She hurried down the basement hallway, which was like all the other hallways but for its lower ceilings and eerie warmth. It resembled a nightmare but it was not a nightmare; here she was, trying every doorknob, finding each one locked.

  Only he had stood on street corners beside her and their piled detritus. Only their two minds in the entire universe contained this same specific set of images: a particular pattern of shadow on the ceiling above a bed, a particular loop of highway ramp circled just as a song about a circle began to play on the radio. Tens of thousands of conversations and jokes. Without him she was just a lonely brain hurtling through space, laughing quietly to itself.

  Hush-a-bye baby, she mouthed. To the beast, yes, but more to herself. The beast had been quiet for a while, perhaps resting. It was just as well, though, that the beast didn’t hear when the bough breaks, the cradle will drop.

  She was shocked when the twentieth or so doorknob gave way beneath her fingers. She pushed, and the door swung open.

  A baby-faced bureaucrat sat on an ergonomic chair in a bright white office. He eyed her scornfully; she felt again that old anxiety of the DMV.

  “I’m from the ninth floor of ‘Z,’” she announced. “I’ve been sent by my superior to check in on an employee who works in this department.”

  The bureaucrat raised his wilted eyebrows but didn’t speak.

  “Can you direct me to—” she said.

  “Superior who?” the bureaucrat interrupted.

  She cursed herself for not knowing the name of The Person with Bad Breath.

  “Ninth floor of ‘Z,’” she emphasized, attempting to match the bureaucrat’s irritability with her own, but even she could hear how juvenile her voice sounded. “It’s a rather urgent matter.”

  “Sorry,” the bureaucrat said unapologetically. “I’m not permitted to release any information without clearance.”

  “Where’s your superior?”

  “Preparing for a meeting.” He motioned with a shoulder toward the inner office, where a colossal bureaucrat could be seen staring at a large computer screen. The screensaver’s yellow sphere was morphing into a purple cube.

  “May I ask him one quick question?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.” It was hard to believe that this person had a home, a bed, a history; that he existed outside the confines of this office.

  “Is there anyone else to whom I can speak?” she said, aiming for disarming formality.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Might you please direct me to the office of Mr. Joseph Jones?”

  “Around here we identify folks by their HS numbers,” the bureaucrat said, though she could have sworn that the briefest recognition passed over his features.

  It took her a second to remember.

  “I’ve got his HS number!” she said.

  She unzipped her bag, her fingers slippery. The bureaucrat watched as she fumbled to pull the file out.

  “You have the file,” the bureaucrat observed, mildly impressed.

  “HS89805273179,” she read.

  “Well, considering you have the file…” The bureaucrat gave in with a defeated sigh, placing his fingers on the keyboard. “What division?”

  “He works in the Department of Birth,” she said.

  “Oh,” the bureaucrat said, removing his fingers, relieved. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, then. You’re in the wrong department.”

  Puzzled, she regarded the bureaucrat’s face, a face so bored it verged on tragic. Had she misunderstood everything?

  Joseph’s file was open in her hands. She focused on the second row. G1, G2, G3. The word popped into her head.

  “I mean Genesis,” she corrected, corking her exclamation mark. “The Department of Genesis.”

  “What’s the HS number again?” the bureaucrat said indifferently, returning his fingers to the keyboard.

  “HS89805273179.” That number: the number meaning his eyebrow, his toe.

  The bureaucrat seemed to relish her agitation as he clicked away on his mouse for several long minutes.

  “Sorry,” he said, still unapologetic, and for a bizarre millisecond she thought he was informing her that Joseph was already dead. “System’s been slow all day.”

  She kept waiting. Every moment moving Joseph closer to whatever it was that would kill him. Something was happening in her stomach, a tornado of queasiness.

  “HS89805273179,” the bureaucrat said at last. “He works here.”

  “Where?” Josephine demanded, triumphant.

  “Here,” the bureaucrat said.

  “I mean, where’s his office?”

  “I can’t release that information without clearance from a superior.”

  “What?” She was fierce. “We already did this! I have his file, don’t I?”

  “Rules is rules,” he said, offering up a fraction of a shrug.

  “Tell me where he is.” She slapped the bureaucrat’s desk. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Your poor planning is not my emergency,” the bureaucrat quoted. This time his shrug was even subtler. “Look, I won’t call security on you,” he added magnanimously.

  “Security?” she thundered.

  But those seven words had used up all his stores of generosity. “Or maybe…” he said, reaching toward the phone on his desk.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Back out in the hallway, she felt the weight of the entire building above her, as dense and impenetrable as the core of the planet. It pressed down on her, deflating her: just a pair of frightened, bloodshot eyes roving amid the remains of a skin-colored balloon.

  Maintain your focus.

  Locate 041-74-3400.

  “Okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay,” she muttered.

  His name a synonym for file.

  Correction: his name a synonym for life, that’s what she’d meant.

  Her mind unsteady.

  Her gut unsteady, that’s what she meant.

  Then the footsteps. Not the tap-tap-tap-tap-tap of bureaucrat shoes. These were sneaker footsteps. Sneaky footsteps. The footsteps of someone wearing a sweatshirt.

  Merciful: a door bearing a picture of a woman in a triangular dress.

  * * *

  The slipping figure on the yellow CAUTION! WET FLOOR sign in the restroom looked like someone preparing for sex or for birth, its androgynous legs flung open with abandon; abandon, the untamable urge, she was kneeling, clinging, heaving herself into a toilet, the tornado whirling her apart, molecules and despair.

  The seven minutes she spent trying to pull herself back together passed in hazy, slow-motion desperation. Each minute potentially fatal for him. She cooled her cheek on the toilet seat as she shrank before all the different weapons that could be used against her—the ever-growing headache, the overwhelming pattern of the tile.

  “There, there, child,” someone said, the voice far huskier than Trishiffany’s.

  “Trishiffany?” she begged.

  Something new had started to happen inside her, waves moving in a different direction. She swirled herself around, diarrhea, swirled herself back down, vomit. She held on to the toilet like it was Joseph, there was something so wrong with her, she was going to die, she could smell the animal stink of it, the shame. But it wasn’t her file she’d found, was it, and she remembered about the beast, how beasts make their mothers do all sorts of repulsive things early on, and there
was a flicker of joy, and she became less scared, and the cloak embraced her back.

  By the time she was done in the stall, the nice stranger had fled. Had there been a nice stranger?

  When she emerged again into the relentless hallway, it wasn’t easy to walk straight, but the complete emptiness of her gut provided a certain courage, the kind of courage that enabled her not to care about the smell emanating from her mouth as she walked from door to door, jerking madly on every knob, knocking hard like the police when the knob didn’t give.

  But no one ever came to open any door, and she kept going and going until at long last a doorknob responded to her touch, and she entered a small office with sickly pinkish walls, and said the name of the dark-haired man sitting at the desk beside a stack of gray files.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  His back was to the door, his desk flush with the opposite wall. He turned slowly to face her.

  Joseph: the one who spoke her best language.

  But it wasn’t Joseph.

  The eyes were a different color, the chin a different shape, the demeanor more delicate.

  “Oh,” she said, “sorry.”

  The bureaucrat nodded, his face neutral. His fingers lingered on the keyboard of his typewriter even as he looked at her. She pretended, briefly, that he was Joseph; that this was the one who mattered, the one whose file she was brave enough to steal.

  “I’m looking for Joseph Jones,” she whispered. It was so hushed in there; even her breathing was an intrusion.

  The bureaucrat gazed and waited.

  She pulled the file out of her bag.

  “HS89805273179,” she clarified.

  The bureaucrat nodded a second time, his eyes on the file. After an apologetic glance at his typewriter, he stood up. He took the three steps across the office toward her, opened the door, and gestured for her to pass through first.