What a companion the beast had been.
Someone knocked on the door.
It had to be her. She had to be the one who flushed the toilet.
* * *
“Tell me something,” she said.
“The songs we love are dictated by mathematical formulas,” he said fearfully. “I didn’t tell you when we stepped on worms.”
* * *
The difficult minutes.
Someone knocked on the door.
But when she threw it open, no one was standing outside.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Office of Processing Errors was empty. There were no files on the desk.
They walked toward the door propped open by the wooden wedge. She felt something wet on the inside of her cloak. In a trash can somewhere, a positive pregnancy stick still damp with urine. Unsteady, she stumbled over the wedge as they passed through. It slid out of place and the door clicked shut behind them.
But they were not back in the fluorescent hallway as they should have been. Instead, they were in an unfamiliar, ill-lit space.
A caged lightbulb sticking out of the wall directly above their heads illuminated a few square feet, gray paint peeling. The room stretched upward into darkness, vanished into darkness on all sides.
He spun around to open the door. It was locked. He wrenched the handle and cursed.
“No use,” she said sedately. Her brain felt soft, her vision blurred, her insides liquid. She was dreamy, devastated.
Beneath the small globe of light they hung on to each other.
One of them cried and one of them didn’t.
Eventually they let go, turned to face the darkness.
“Wait,” he said, pointing forward. “Is that an exit sign?”
She squinted.
“See that red light?”
A distant smudge of red. She didn’t trust her eyes.
“I need glasses,” she said.
She did feel something though: an almost imperceptible chill wind, grazing her overheated face, stirring the husk of the cloak. She listened to the utter silence inside herself.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her a few steps into the room. The lightbulb behind them clicked off. A flash of darkness. Warmth between their palms. The next bulb clicked on. It was mounted on a metal shelving unit burdened by boxes filled with files.
Her bureaucrat’s eye was quick to notice that the labels on these files, unlike all the others she had ever encountered, did not bear a surname followed by a given name. Instead, there were word pairings she didn’t recognize: ALLOLOBOPHORA CHLOROTICA, and AMYNTHAS DIFFRINGENS, and APORRECTODEA TUBERCULATA.
She let go of him, floated toward a box of files, lifted her hand to run her fingertips across the familiar gray edges.
“No,” he said, pulling her away.
There was a sharp noise behind them, back beyond the door through which they had passed, a fast pattern of footsteps, stilettos on concrete, talons on metal, and then a massive mechanical click.
All the caged bulbs turned on at once, shocking her brain with light. She had to shut her eyes. A cell twitched, split. A handful of birds or bats swooshed upward in the darkness behind her lids. Something disappeared into the underbrush. Forests’ worth of paper. The smell of trillions of sheets of paper, the smell of worms digesting paper, excreting paper.
She dared to open her eyes. The space vaster than her imagination. The metal shelves endless in the light, their relentless geometry expanding upward and outward, vanishing into radiance. Files, forever. Lives and deaths rustling and shuffling and fluttering alongside hers. The outrageous heat of her blood. His hand. Any minute now they would step forward in the brilliance toward the exit sign, past the file of the worm. The file of the dog. The file of the rat. The file of the swan. The file of the turtle. The file of the cockroach. The file of our child, our child. And your file too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN PHILLIPS’S first collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was named a notable collection of 2011 by The Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, and The Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, among others. Her work has been featured on PRI’s Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Slice, BOMB, Fairy Tale Review, and PEN America. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. You can sign up for email updates here.
Also by Helen Phillips
And Yet They Were Happy
Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
About the Author
Also by Helen Phillips
Copyright
THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT. Copyright © 2015 by Helen Phillips. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Jacket photographs: insect © Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG/Getty Images, pomegranate © julichka/Getty Images, hand © CSA Images/Getty Images
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Phillips, Helen, 1983–
The beautiful bureaucrat: a novel / Helen Phillips.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN: 978-1-62779-376-6 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-62779-377-3 (electronic book) 1. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.H45565B43 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014045386
e-ISBN 978-1-62779-377-3
First Edition: August 2015
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel Page 13