The Beautiful Bureaucrat (19 page)

“Thank you,” Joseph said.

The Person with Bad Breath glanced up, surprised.

“Oh, don’t thank me,” The Person with Bad Breath said with a dusty chuckle. “There’s nothing benevolent here either. I’m not doing favors, I’m doing paperwork. Getting all the ducks in a row.”

Then The Person with Bad Breath held the tiny brush suspended above the child’s form. Trishiffany breathed in, breathed out, licked lipstick off her teeth. The smell of the Wite-Out merged with the smell of the breath. Joseph looked at Josephine, his face burning with hope, and lunged forward to seize the arm of The Person with Bad Breath.

But the wrist eluded him, the hand fell, the Wite-Out smeared the second row.

The beast had been silent for so long.

“Please sit, Jojo doll.”

Josephine sank into the chair, confronting Trishiffany’s bloodshot eyes with her own. Aside from those godforsaken eyes and that disguised rough skin, Trishiffany was perfectly beautiful. Put her in a purple robe with a hood and she could stand merciful in a churchyard. She came around from behind the desk. Awkwardly, she ran a finger down Josephine’s cheek. Her hand smelled like coconuts and cheap gold jewelry.

“My goodness,” she marveled, more to herself than to anyone else, “I could swear your skin’s already improving. And look at those eyes.”

Deep inside, a fist clenched and unclenched, clenched and unclenched, clenched and unclenched, the weird beat of it interfering with Josephine’s breath. With each clench she released a fragile moan; Trishiffany tensed every time.

Marriage.

Miscarriage.

Miss Carriage.

But she was only pretending. It was just her own voice in her own head.

When she opened her eyes, her lap was filling with blood.

*   *   *

The
sound grew deep inside her, from the place where she was losing blood, and pressed against all her orifices, shoving itself past her tongue, between her teeth.

“Steady there, Jojo doll,” Trishiffany murmured. “You’ve got to stop that shrieking.”

She tried to stop, and eventually she did.

As soon as Josephine was quiet, Trishiffany took hold of her elbow and motioned for Joseph to do the same on the opposite side.

Together they limped toward one of the doors behind the desk. The Person with Bad Breath stood up as they passed and frowned at the trail of red on the immaculate gray floor.

“We’ll take care of the paperwork.” Trishiffany sounded subdued, fatigued, though her hair was as bright and voluminous as ever. She pressed the door open into a bathroom. “You should have everything you need in there.”

“You’re both fired, of course.” The Person with Bad Breath lifted two fingers to those dry lips and smiled at Josephine, the gentlest of gestures, something somewhere between the sign for “hush” and the motion that precedes blowing a kiss.

“Go ahead,” Trishiffany commanded, stately on her stilettos as Joseph guided Josephine through the doorway. “Onward and upward, Jojo dolls.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

She sat on the toilet, staring down at the thing that shouldn’t be stared at.

*   *   *

He
pried her underwear off from around her ankles and put them in the trash can.

Someone knocked on the door.

When he tried to reach behind her to flush, she snarled.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said, lifting his hands above his head like a man held up at gunpoint.

*   *   *

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

H
ELEN
P
HILLIPS
’
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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