The Beautiful Bureaucrat (18 page)

A brave bureaucrat traversing darkened hallways, sneaking into classified rooms, while just a couple of neighborhoods away a mistrustful bureaucrat sat panicking on a stranger’s bed, walked panicking through a stranger’s home, filled up with ungenerous speculation.

“I’m sorry,” she said, almost too softly for him to hear.

“There were some hiccups,” he continued. “The file got booted back to me late yesterday. That’s why I had to stay here last night, to figure out what was going on. The form was missing one critical date. But I put the corrected paperwork in Outgoing early this morning. Our blastocyst will become an embryo any second now.”

Under other circumstances, she would have said something loving to him just then, would have found a way to celebrate, turned her fingers into fireworks: his disappearances magnificently explained, their child’s precious cells dividing and dividing and dividing inside her. But the other thing loomed, pressing down.

“I work here,” she began.

“You?” He was incredulous.

“In ‘Z.’”

“In ‘Z,’” he repeated, somber. “They swore you to secrecy too, right?”

“In ‘Z,’” she echoed, trapped in the three letters, unable to forge ahead.

He cupped her neck with both hands, the way he sometimes did.

How many minutes remained in their life together?

She said his name slowly, as though The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt wasn’t waiting on the other side of the door. She pulled his file out of her bag.

His gaze sharpened as he recognized it.

“I stole this,” she said.

“Why would you do that?” he demanded.

She couldn’t say it. She opened the file. Her finger, the same finger with which she had stroked him in all sorts of places, the same finger with which she had pointed to hundreds of thousands of other things. But now, here on this page, pointing, complicit with D10082013.

THIRTY-FIVE

The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt was not beside the door when they exited the office. They ran down the interminable hallway that continued from the basement of “A” to the basement of “Z.” She reached for Joseph’s hand. He did not reach back. There was a force field of solitude around him. He ran a foot ahead of her, sometimes seeming like a stranger, sometimes like her twin. He refused to look at her. She wanted to know what it was that he didn’t want her to see: panic, selfishness, loneliness. Humble nervous pitiful human hope. She was thirstier than ever. The beast was mute. May the beast feel only a warm dark slosh. The file flapped, slapped her wrist. She tried to say something but her lips were quivering, unreliable. The straight unbroken line of empty hallway. Gravity sucked on their soles, pulled on their lungs. Behind them, someone pointed an invisible gun at Joseph’s back.

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Through the
EMERGENCY EXIT
door, up the infinite stairwell, he always two steps ahead, never looking back.

*   *   *

And
now: an
EMERGENCY EXIT
door opening from the stairwell onto the tenth and top floor of “Z.” Don’t make a peep. Stop breathing so hard. The hum of fluorescence. Monotonous doors sealed against intrusion.

But what’s this. Hold my hand, finally. A door dead center in the hallway, propped open with a wooden wedge, eerily inviting. And here: The words we were seeking. Minuscule font beneath old tape.

THIRTY-SIX

“Welcome to Processing Errors,” Trishiffany said with a wink. “We’ve been waiting for ages. We thought you’d never get here, Jojo dolls!”

She sat behind the metal desk, her suit halfway between red and pink. Beside her, The Person with Bad Breath serenely tapped a pencil on the lone gray file on the desk.

The office was similar to Joseph’s, to Josephine’s: small and windowless. But behind the desk, there were two doors. And this office, unlike theirs, felt eminently placid. These walls, Josephine observed, free of smudges and fingerprints.

“Perfect,” The Person with Bad Breath said. “She has his file.”

“Just as we expected,” Trishiffany said.

“Lock the door!” Josephine commanded Joseph, who stood a step behind her.

“No need,” The Person with Bad Breath said as Joseph turned to twist the lock.

“Paranoid much, Jojo doll?” Trishiffany smiled.

“We were followed all the way here by your assassin,” Josephine said.

Trishiffany giggled. “Our assassin?”

“The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt. He’s been following me for weeks.”

“I have a gray sweatshirt,” Joseph said.

“Every man is the man in the gray sweatshirt,” The Person with Bad Breath intoned.

The words emerged from a gust of breath so noxious that Josephine worried about the beast’s well-being; surely there was something harmful in such an exhalation.

“I’m not feeling great,” Joseph said, eyeing the file on the desk.

“Take a seat.” The Person with Bad Breath indicated a pair of plastic chairs.

“He’s dying!” Josephine cried out.

“Not exactly,” Trishiffany said.

“What is that?” Joseph said, pointing at the file on the desk but unable to look.

“It’s what you think it is,” Trishiffany said tenderly.

“What is it?” Josephine demanded, but the cool, dreadful certainty was already propelling her.

She seized the file a millisecond before Trishiffany’s manicured hand could prevent her. She backed up toward Joseph, looking ferociously at the bureaucrats, ready to hiss if either of them interfered. But Trishiffany and The Person with Bad Breath remained tranquil as she opened the file.

It contained a single sheet of paper. She was having a hard time looking at it, yet she couldn’t stop.

Something caught her eye in the fourth row. Following the M/G, the familiar HS89805242381.

“My password for the Database?” she said.

“Yes, but, more significantly, your HS number,” The Person with Bad Breath said.

“You were the 89,805,242,381st Homo sapiens ever conceived,” Trishiffany said. “And your child was the 129,285,656,702nd.”

“Do you know how many hours I spent sneaking around here in the middle of the night to find your number,” Joseph muttered to Josephine.

“One among many transgressions,” Trishiffany said.

“Trespassing in a superior’s office,” The Person with Bad Breath elaborated. “Opening a confidential filing cabinet. Stealing an unauthorized form. Trespassing in File Storage
N
. Trespassing in File Storage
J
. Copying down confidential information. Using a superior’s typewriter to fill in a form with fraudulent information. Typing fraudulent information into the Database. Persisting in doctoring a fraudulent file and placing said file in Outgoing even after deactivation was requested by a superior. Unauthorized presence on site after hours and before hours.”

“On three separate occasions,” Trishiffany added.

“What do you expect,” Joseph said, “once someone realizes he can create a life?”

“Zygote, Blastocyst, Embryo, Fetus!” Josephine comprehended as she scrutinized the second row.

“Today’s our embryo day,” Joseph said. He put his finger on the 10082013 following the G3(E).

10082013.

10082013.

“But that’s what’s no good,” Trishiffany said. “See how the number sags below the embryo-date line into the paternal-death-date line? The typewritten text must remain entirely within its appointed space.”

Joseph snatched the file away from Josephine and examined the form.

“You did a fine job,” The Person with Bad Breath congratulated. “Your work certainly reveals an above-average understanding of the mechanisms. But even the finest counterfeit never made it all the way through.”

“She conceived, didn’t she?” Joseph protested.

“You’re diligent, Joey-Jo,” Trishiffany admitted, giving him a sad little smile. “Those must have been some long nights. But things are what they are.”

“You typed in your own death date,” Josephine whispered in disbelief, pulling the file away from him.

“I was typing in the blastocyst-to-embryo transfer date,” he countered. “I was fixing the error that got the file sent back to me yesterday. The first time around I didn’t realize I had to include that date.”

“Oh, no, Joey-Jo. The file got sent back to you because the system had already identified the falsification,” Trishiffany said. “You should have deactivated the file, as per your instructions. Sweetly into the ether, so to speak.”

“Instead, you triggered your own death processing,” The Person with Bad Breath said.

“Typewriters are tricky,” Trishiffany soothed. “Though they do have certain advantages in a system like ours.”

“Typewriters are tricky and now he’s going to die?” Josephine raged.

“Well, at this particular instant, both facts seem to be true,” The Person with Bad Breath said. “Your blastocyst is becoming an embryo on 10082013, and Joseph David Jones is dying on 10082013.”

Josephine grabbed Joseph’s right hand, clamping his finger bones in her grip.

“But not for long,” Trishiffany said lightly. “We’ll get everything corrected straightaway. Make it all line up.”

“A bit of extra paperwork,” The Person with Bad Breath said.

“An annoyance, to be sure,” Trishiffany continued. “A touch of heartache. But all shall be well and all shall be well and all shall be well. Why don’t you hand over those files, Jojo doll.”

Josephine shook her head. The fluorescence illuminated every flaw in each bureaucrat’s skin. She could feel it gleaming over the constellation of zits on her forehead. The whole world smelled like The Person with Bad Breath.

“It’s just paperwork now,” Trishiffany said. “Just a matter of sending one file through Processing Errors and deactivating the other.”

Josephine’s throat released a knotted snarl. Trishiffany didn’t acknowledge the sound, the primal disagreement; she briskly clapped her hands.

“Come now, Jojo doll!”

“Why are you doing this to us?” Josephine tried to yell, but the words came out limp, her voice feeble.

Trishiffany released a short sharp laugh. “Nothing malevolent here, dear! We’re all just doing what we have to do.”

Josephine clung to the files. Joseph rested his head against her head and together they looked down at the blank boxes of their child’s form. And then at Joseph’s form, the chaos following the first four lines, the boxes of letters and numbers and symbols, the dense forest of his paperwork.

“Let’s get it over with, kiddos.” Trishiffany’s words were flippant but her tone was forlorn.

That forlornness in her voice caused Josephine to loosen her grip on the files. She stepped forward and placed them on the desk.

“Atta girl,” Trishiffany said wearily.

“You should sit down, Ms. Newbury,” The Person with Bad Breath said, as Trishiffany produced a bottle of Wite-Out from her bra and passed it to her coworker.

The Person with Bad Breath unscrewed the Wite-Out, opened both files, and painted the liquid over the death date on Joseph’s form.