Authors: Helen Phillips

The Beautiful Bureaucrat (14 page)

BOOK: The Beautiful Bureaucrat

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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 sublet, 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.

But here she was: pregnant.

* * *

Walking
to the subway, she saw a pot of marigolds atop a parked car. One can always build one’s life. The cloak protected her just enough from the chill of the October morning. She stroked “Your Growing Baby” in her bag. Rich with life.
What if you had a moment of absolute happiness right now, right this very second. Come on, give it a try.

And there it was: a swell of happiness, a flash of happiness.

Happy nest.

Ha penis.

She could live with this, with the gray files piled on her desk; she could be the one who ferried names from this side to the other. She could—she could see dignity in that. She would steal a name from the Database and give it to the beast. A good, solid, strong, fanciful, flexible name. A name for a beast to do with as it wished—gnaw on, or cast aside.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Josephine twisted the key and prepared to press all her weight against the door of her office. She assumed the accumulated files had reached the doorway by now, blocking passage inward.

But the door opened easily. She was not greeted by the mountain of files that had ruled her imagination. Instead, four tame stacks awaited her on the desk. The calendar was still tacked to the wall as she had left it. The Database hummed as it always hummed. Today the sound struck her as neutral; perhaps even benevolent.

Bene violent.

Bone el vent.

The month had turned, but she didn’t flip the calendar. She put her hand on the wall, leaned closer, looked anew for the woman and child in the shadow of the trees.

HS89805242381: This time, her fingertips relished the familiarity of the password.

She picked up the file of
EMMITT JUDD ARCHINGTON
.

ACHING TORN.

CHANTING OR.

She searched the HS number, cross-checked the information, input the date. Her first file since the emergency batch of airplane fatalities; the first file she had ever knowingly processed.

It was less harrowing than she had anticipated.

She remained calm as the names came rushing up at her. She hardly thought about the fact that each of these files represented someone who had once been born to a mother. She averted her eyes from the line containing the birth dates, protected herself from the ages: the thirty-one-year-old, the seventeen-year-old, the two-year-old. Every name she encountered was a possible name for the beast.

By the time she logged the twentieth file, it was as though she’d never stopped.

She put her hands under her shirt, savored the remarkable warmth.

The silence in her office was so complete she began to believe that everyone had left the building and the city and the world. Only she and her beast remained on this abandoned planet. The bathroom too had become a place of profound and uncanny solitude; she hurried away from there, back to her familiar bruised walls. She started when the heater in the corner released its first hiss of the season.

She was starving before noon. She sat at her desk eating an oversize deli sandwich, bought to nourish life. Avocado, spinach. As though she hadn’t spent all morning doing what she’d been doing. As though she was only the most minor of accomplices.

While she ate, she flipped through “Your Growing Baby,” examined the timeline: zygote to blastocyst to embryo to fetus to baby. She looked again at the illustration of week five. She willed the beast to share with her its deep dark coziness. But then she felt ashamed that she, the adult, the mother, was the one seeking comfort; how ridiculous, to ask her own offspring to serve as her shelter.

Even after she finished the sandwich, a vast hunger haunted her.