The Beautiful Bureaucrat (5 page)

Josephine was astonished, uneasy.

“Yes, can I help you?” the woman said with the clipped civility of a kind yet overwhelmed bureaucrat.

Josephine asked her second doppelgänger about the vending machine.

“Fifth floor,” the woman replied with confidence before excusing herself back into her office. “Enjoy!”

Josephine distractedly wandered the empty hallway of the fifth floor twice before concluding that she had been misled.

She hesitated a moment before knocking on a door on the fifth floor. This door was opened by a third bureaucrat: another polite young woman remarkable in her averageness. She assured Josephine that the vending machine was on the third floor. The skin around the woman’s eyes was flushed, as though she had recently been crying, or maybe just rubbing her eyes too hard.

Josephine shivered several times as she reentered the elevator and descended to the third floor. Already the women’s faces and forms were fading. Perhaps they hadn’t resembled her so very much after all. But—hadn’t they?

There she found it, at the far end of the hallway on the third floor. The vending machine was dusty with disuse. Most of the candy looked vintage, the bold colors and elaborate fonts of an earlier era. The rest of it looked brand-new, newer than new, candies she’d never heard of, futuristic white-and-silver packaging. She was grateful to recognize one item, the Mars bar—never her favorite but at least familiar. She slipped her quarters into the slot and punched the correct number. When she reached into the bin to retrieve the Mars bar, what she pulled out was a pack of lavender mints that looked like something her grandmother would have eaten as a child. She had no more quarters.

“Screw you,” she whispered at the vending machine.

On her way up to the ninth floor in the elevator, she unwrapped the lavender candies. By the time she arrived back at her office, she was addicted to their perfumed taste, the sharp edges of each pale-purple square.

Halfway through the pack, her tongue started to bleed, cut by the candy as it disintegrated in her mouth, sharp as bird bones. But all afternoon she kept eating lavender candies, inputting data, eating lavender candies, inputting data.

*   *   *

When
she returned from work that day, he was pacing around the room. No candles, no dinner, just a brown-paper shopping bag under his arm.

“Let’s go,” he said before she was fully inside. “Put on something.”

“Something?” she said. Her mouth was sore. She would never again eat another lavender candy.

“Festive,” he said. “Suggestive. Progressive.”

She wanted to scoff at that. Everything was in storage except for the meek clothing she wore to work. But she did put on a pair of oversize red plastic earrings.

They walked in the direction opposite the aboveground subway track and eventually came to the park. He led her around, searching for the perfect bench—near the lake, no gum gobs, not too close to an overflowing trash can. Several versions of the perfect bench were inhabited, so they settled for a less-than-perfect one, its paint peeling off in large patches. Still, they had a good view of the lake.

He pulled celebratory foods—a baguette and Brie, figs and olives and sparkling water and dark chocolate—out of the paper bag.

“What’s the occasion?” she said.

“Life.”

She tried to be delighted, but there was something peculiar about him. She bit into a fig, watched a pair of swans glide luminous in the transformative white light of sundown. One by one the pinkish lamps alongside the lake clicked on. The city was so generous sometimes. Here she could almost believe her windowless office in the gray building had ceased to exist. If no one is there to be mastered by the Database, is the Database still master?

“Aren’t the swans nice?” she said.

“You mean the swan?” he said.

“There are two.”

“One,” he countered.

“Two!” she insisted.

She blinked at the swans. As she blinked, the double necks resolved themselves into a single neck.

“You’re right,” she admitted, irritated by her used-up eyes.

Two kids rolled shrieking down the little incline behind the bench, their skin golden and grass-marked in the lamplight, while the father egged them on and the mother looked upward and outward, away from her family.

“Crazy little zombie bambis,” Joseph said. Sharply she looked over at him. She couldn’t read his tone, irritated or charmed, weary or yearning.

*   *   *

Even
after a night of figs and swans, her windowless office in AZ/ZA awaited her. But on Thursday morning she felt slightly calmer than usual, more open to speculation about the people represented by the files. A woman with a name like Esme Lafayette Gold had to have a more dramatic life than someone named Josephine Anne Newbury. She pictured metallic green eye shadow and satin dresses in gem hues and tragic loves, before chiding herself for falling into clichés; Esme could just as well be a first-grade teacher who always wore muted colors and went to bed at 8:30 p.m. Or maybe she was a first-grade teacher who wore metallic-green eye shadow. How about Jonathan Andrew Hall? Was he as bland and agreeable as his name suggested, or was he filled with rage? Did he go by JAH and listen to death metal? Had the very agreeableness of his name served as the seed of his rage?

She yawned and stretched her arms and looked at the ceiling, which had fewer marks and gashes than the walls. When she turned her attention back down to JAH’s file, she screamed: The Person with Bad Breath was centimeters away from her desk.

“Goodness gracious,” The Person with Bad Breath said, bringing hands to ears.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Josephine said.

“Forgiven.” The smile was dry, yes, but not unfriendly. “I trust that you are thriving here?”

She felt only somewhat deceitful as she nodded her agreement. The Person with Bad Breath didn’t move to leave but instead seemed to be waiting for Josephine’s next words.

“The work suits you, does it not?” The Person with Bad Breath said.

Emboldened by this note of kindness, by the slight vulnerability evident in the fact that her boss’s shirt collar had flipped up in the back and was not lying impeccably beneath the gray jacket, Josephine found herself confessing: “I wonder about them.”

“About whom?” The Person with Bad Breath inquired, as though it wasn’t obvious. “Oh,
them
.” Now moving toward the door, reaching for the knob, almost gone. “It is better never to wonder about them.”

The orderly quiet of Josephine’s office had alchemized into dense silence. She spent the rest of the workday blasting through files, devoid of curiosity, dying to get the hell home and just be a person with Joseph.

SIX

When she returned from work, he wasn’t at the stranger’s apartment. She pulled a postal notice off the door and stepped inside just as she heard the three-headed dog heave itself against the door at the end of the hall. Her hands felt weak and her eyes hazy. She added the postal notice to the stranger’s feral pile of mail on the bedside table. She sat down on the futon. She called Joseph’s phone. It went straight to voice mail. She didn’t leave a message.

She opened the mini-fridge. There was half an onion and some expired sour cream. She was hungry and not hungry.

She decided to do good things. She lit the candles. She gathered up all the dirty laundry, sheets included, and tried to remember if the stranger had said anything about the location of the building’s laundry room. But then she realized she had no quarters or detergent, and the thought of remedying those problems felt insurmountable. Anyway, they’d made it this far without doing laundry.

She found couscous and chickpeas in the cupboard. She found curry powder. She cut up the onion, turned on the burner, made something, ladled the concoction onto two of the stranger’s green heirloom plates, spread the blanket on the floor, put a pair of candles in the middle, folded paper towels into napkins. She was pleased at her resourcefulness, notwithstanding her failure in regard to the laundry. She knew he would come in the door any second; every move she made, she imagined him walking in on that particular tableau, of her slicing or stirring or serving or folding, and she anticipated the exact expression he’d make, the thing with the eyebrows, the faux surprise, pretending he’d forgotten that she too could cook.

The food was cooling on the floor. She called his phone again; voice mail again. She turned on the radio balanced on the ledge in the stranger’s shower stall and pretended the newsman’s voice was Joseph talking to her from the other room, making measured and tranquilizing predictions about the future and the stock market. She waited, then devoured her food. She called him a third time and left a peevish voice mail. She texted him a single question mark.

Time passed; more than an hour. She called him again, told his voice mail that she was kind of freaking out. She vacillated between worry and rage. She couldn’t stand to spend another second inside this apartment without him. There was a rotten smell emerging from the closet. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder if he’d left any sort of note. She shuffled through the stranger’s unruly mail. The postal notice that had been on the door earlier slipped to the floor. She picked it up. She was about to stick it deep into the middle of the pile when the familiar letters caught her eye.

In the intended-recipient box:
JOSEPHINE NEWBURY
.

But they hadn’t told anyone the address of the sublet.

She examined the notice.
FIRST DELIVERY ATTEMPT FAILED
:
Package could not be delivered/signature needed
. There was no information about the sender. Her fingers were quivering. She blew out the candles. She turned on the overhead light. A train ached past the window.

She now detested the automated lady who repeatedly offered her the option of leaving a voice message for Joseph Jones. Who, after many messages left, informed her that Joseph Jones’s voice mailbox was full. She saw that her text had never been delivered. She considered calling the police. She imagined them laughing at her. A husband a few hours late getting home. Sorry, baby, you’re not the first. The overhead light stared her down. She turned it off and sat awake on the bed for many hours.

SEVEN

At her desk on Friday, logging files into the Database, Josephine began to believe she was the only person in the entire building. It was so silent in 9997—no noise but the sound of her fingers on the keyboard, her fingers opening the files—that she sensed a scream beneath the silence, a shrill shriek she recognized as the flow of her own blood in her ears, yet it sounded like a banshee trapped in the walls. Those pinkish clawed walls—she generally avoided looking at them, but today she got stuck staring at the mysterious smudges and old fingerprints, as though the walls themselves might reveal his whereabouts.

Tonight she would call the police, and the parents, who had warned them what would happen if they left the hinterland. Her mother had stood in the beige kitchen of their hinterland rental, talking about the thing she’d seen on the news: Nowadays, gangs of teens in the big cities would just come up to strangers at random on the street and punch them. Just punch them in the face! As part of some gang initiation or something. And that was just the kind of horrid thing that happened in some places and not others. And what if, say, Josephine were to be pregnant at some point, and a gang of teens just punched her on the street? What then? Her mother knew exactly how to kill her every time. Her conversations with her mother were a list of things she thought but didn’t say. Why would you move to a place where you don’t know a living soul? (Haven’t you noticed that our life here is not progressing, Mom? That we’re stuck? That we’re getting flattened by the freeways?) You’ll be all alone there! (What about Joseph, Mom?) Friendless! (I’ll be with Joseph, Mom. Love of my life, Mom.) But by then her mother was crying—melodramatic tears, yet still tears.

Friendless! Friendless! It lingered like a curse.

The door shot open. Josephine seized up, expecting The Person with Bad Breath, but it was Trishiffany who paraded in. She stood before Josephine’s desk in a suit the color of a stop sign, hugging a single gray file to her breasts, her hair voluminous.