The Beautiful Bureaucrat (16 page)

The woman released a heavy sigh.

“You’ve found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others,” Hillary continued thoughtfully. “Sometimes you’re affable and extroverted, but often you’re more wary and reserved. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker.”

“Stop it!” Josephine said, reaching between the two of them, breaking Hillary’s eye contact with the woman’s hand.

“Well hallelujah,” Hillary said. “Look who’s here!”

“That’s
my
fortune!” Josephine said, childish in her despair: She had come here to find out how he was going to die, and now she knew her artificial psychic couldn’t reveal a thing.

Hillary wasn’t sheepish.

“That’s everyone’s fortune, sugarplum!” she replied. “Anyway, I’m just a hobbyist.”

The customer was looking at Josephine with mild annoyance. “She’s a genius,” the woman said. “Every word she said, one hundred and ten percent true.”

“Even though you have a few personality weaknesses, you’re totally able to compensate for them,” Hillary informed the woman.

“Here’s another Zita for your collection.” Luminous with gratitude, the woman handed Hillary a thin wooden board pulled from her purse.

Hillary examined it, cooing with delight. Then she flipped the board so Josephine could see the painting.

In one hand the witch held a set of oversize keys and in the other an apple. It was one of those awkward folk-arty paintings in primary colors, the proportions all wrong, the head enormous, the mouth off-kilter. The eyes were big and messy, but somehow still looked straight out at you. Either the artist had made a mistake with the lines of the dress or the witch was meant to be a humpback. Josephine hated the painting. The apple looked like a handful of blood.

“Saint Zita,” Hillary explained. “The patron saint of waitresses and lost keys.”

“Did you know, my husband, he’s a plumber, there’s a patron saint for him,” the woman said. “There’s patron saints for frickin’ everyone.”

“Not for bureaucrats,” Josephine muttered.

“Oh sure there is,” Hillary said. “You just have to look it up in the index.”

“Well I guess I better shove off,” the woman said.

Josephine reached into her bag to touch his file. Her panic gave way to an excruciating sadness. Sadness that distorted her senses and transformed all colors into agents of cruelty. She closed her queasy eyes against their aggressions.

Then she was in a booth. Hillary sat close beside her on the red pleather. Was there or was there not a rose fragrance emanating from her royal purple uniform. Once more Josephine had the sensation of people staring at her. They frightened her, the people of the world. She was scared to look up, scared to observe the smiles and frowns on their faces. They were the spies of The Person with Bad Breath. The spoons were too, and the saltshaker, the napkin dispenser, the strand of hair; all of them keeping tabs on her, the thief. Again she shut her eyes.

“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.