The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel Read online

  And there was a certain satisfaction in it, in making her way through the piles of gray files, in noting the odder or more colorful names, in observing the small yet striking coincidences (a triumvirate of surnames that ended with “X,” someone with the initials “SOB,” a pair of Michael Jacksons), in sliding the files one by one into Outgoing. She pictured herself building a wall. Stone by stone by stone. She was precise and rigorous. Occasionally she’d catch a minuscule error (exchange the Database’s MARY for the form’s MARIE, insert the space in the surname DEL SOL).

  Still, the distance between four o’clock and five o’clock, between 148 files and 166 files, often felt interminable. Sometimes, in the depths of the afternoon, Josephine would have a thought—an intense, riveting thought, incongruous with her current task and location, something she ought to share with Joseph, a hint of a scene from a dream or a forgotten memory from when she was a kid, a complicated pun or a new conviction about how they ought to live their lives—but then the moment would pass and the thought would be lost, trapped forever between the horizontal and vertical lines of the Database. She’d spend the rest of the workday mourning the loss, resenting the jail cell from which her thought would never escape. In the late afternoon, frantic for respite of any sort, she might pull a yogurt and spoon out of her bag and peel back the foil and shut her eyes and begin to eat it blind.

  It was of course at precisely such moments that The Person with Bad Breath always happened to open the door. Instinctively, Josephine would hide her food beneath her desk, not so much to conceal the fact that she was pausing to eat but rather so that no molecule of The Person with Bad Breath’s breath might approach her spoon.

  “Remember, you need the Database as much as the Database needs you!” The Person with Bad Breath might say, or some other similar platitude, slipping a mint between dry lips.

  Josephine would respond with the all-purpose hinterland grin of her childhood, and as soon as the door swung shut behind The Person with Bad Breath, a wave of relief would carry her through the remaining files.

  When five o’clock arrived at long last, Josephine rapidly gathered her things, almost tripping over herself, dying to be outside, to see what color the sun was. She half-ran down the hallway, only to find herself back in that same hallway sixteen hours later, trudging toward 9997.

  * * *

  On Friday, as she pulled her cheese sandwich out of her bag at noon, the prospect of eating another solitary lunch in her windowless office became intolerable. Surely somewhere in this massive compound there was a cafeteria of sorts, at least a room with tables and chairs. Maybe even a window.

  Invigorated by the possibility, she put the sandwich back in her bag, slung the bag over her shoulder, and headed out into the hallway. She’d simply ask someone. But the hallway was vacant, no bureaucrats as far as she could see in either direction, not even the distant tap of footsteps, and every door was sealed.

  She turned right, away from the office of The Person with Bad Breath, and knocked softly on each door as she went. All the doors remained closed, though once or twice she thought she heard the rustle of human activity beyond. She was startled when a door finally opened, eight back from where she stood; it had taken the room’s inhabitant several minutes to respond to her knock. Now the bureaucrat was sticking his head out into the hallway.

  “Over here!” Josephine said, rushing toward him.

  The bureaucrat turned to her and shook his head. He looked like Abraham Lincoln but without the conviction.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Pardon me,” she embellished, when she noted the anxiety tightening his forehead. “I’m wondering—I’m looking for—do you know—is there a cafeteria or break room or anything here?”

  He continued the slow shake of his head. Determined, she looked into his eyes and smiled her kindest smile. She extended her hand to him, but he chose not to notice.

  “I’m new,” she said. His anxiety was contagious. “So that’s why. I don’t know, you know, where things are.”

  He was still shaking his head. Perhaps he was deaf.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please forgive the disturbance.”

  “Indeed” he may or may not have muttered as he closed his door.

  It no longer felt like the right thing to do, to knock on each door she passed. But she refused to eat in her office. She remembered the strip of grass outside the building. She could sit there for five minutes, feel a little sun on her face. She hurried to the elevator and soon was pressing through the door labeled “Z,” into the generous light of September. If she sat cross-legged she could fit on the grass; her cheese sandwich was reborn from a pitiful meal into a pleasant one. She was about to eat the final bite when a lean, elegant bureaucrat exited the building and stood on the steps above her.

  Victorious, bolstered by her new tactic for making the workday more bearable, Josephine beamed up at the woman.

  “Nice day, right?” she said.

  “Sure,” the woman said, “but we all eat at our desks.”

  * * *

  At least in the evenings there was always Joseph in the light of seven Virgin Mary candles. They managed to disguise the original sublet, its gloomy grime, overlaying it with a home of their own, never mind the mildew ever expanding in the shower stall (just shut your eyes, turn the water up to near-burning), never mind the grayish sheets (toss them into the corner, share the single blanket spared from storage). After that first night, he never asked about her job. She was grateful to him for this. And for maintaining the companionable silence of their shared morning commute. And for having the candles lit each night before she came in the door, though he usually beat her home by only ten or fifteen minutes. And for making fun of the irrepressible shudder that passed through her whenever the neighbor’s three-headed dog snarled in the hallway.

  Yet even so, she carried the Database around inside her; it floated in her brain like a net for catching and killing any glistening idea that came along. Sitting on the blanket on the floor, looking deep into the heart of the cheap white wine in the plastic cup, she confessed to Joseph: “I’m becoming a bureaucrat.”

  “Drink some water,” he said. “Eat some vegetables.” He stood up and went to the kitchenette.

  “89805242381!” she whispered to herself. It felt almost good.

  “We still have those carrots I think.”

  “Doesn’t my voice sound like the voice of a bureaucrat?”

  “Actually they’re slimy now,” he said, slamming the door of the mini-fridge. He returned to the blanket and handed her a coffee-stained mug filled with water. “Drink up, bureau rat.”

  “What’s your Social Security number?” It scared her that she’d never learned this basic fact about him.

  “041-74-3400.”

  She repeated it until she’d memorized it.

  “Do you want to know mine?” she asked, almost coy.

  “I’ll just forget it,” he said.

  Still, she said it for him three times in a row, slowly.

  “Your Social Security number has real harmony,” she complimented him. Now her head was resting on his stomach, moving up and down as he breathed. “The zeroes. The fours. It suits you.” She was feeling happy again. An exchange of secrets always helped.

  * * *

  On the second Monday of her employment, she was darting out of the bathroom, scurrying back to her files, when she heard the welcome sound of laughter. The laughing bureaucrat was walking down the hallway in the opposite direction of Josephine’s office, but she couldn’t resist following.

  The woman turned in response to Josephine’s footsteps. A rhinestone gecko held her orange silk neckerchief in place.

  “Hey!” the woman said, waving a sheet of paper in the air. “Check this out!”

  Josephine hurried to her side.

  “Look!” The bureaucrat pointed at the paper.

  It was a memo about an upcoming processing deadline. A piece of bureaucratic paperwork like any ot
her.

  “Look,” the bureaucrat commanded. “Use your eyes.”

  Whenever Josephine heard the word “eyes” these days, her eyes felt even drier.

  “Come on,” the bureaucrat said, growing impatient, pointing at the emboldened DEADLINE at the top of the page.

  But it read DEADLING rather than DEADLINE.

  Josephine released a small “ha,” relieved to be in on the joke. DEADLING. What an awful word: It sounded like dead babies.

  “A typo, I guess,” she said.

  “Yes.” The bureaucrat was displeased by the mildness of Josephine’s amusement. “But what a typo! What a typo!”

  The woman continued on down the hallway, laughing to herself. The sound of it haunted Josephine all the way back to 9997.

  * * *

  That evening, she arrived at the sublet to find the overhead lights on and the candles unlit. Joseph was standing by the single window, gazing out at the train track like a man in a novel.

  “Hey,” she said, hitting the light switch, killing the pale glare. Realizing, chillingly, how much she took it for granted that he would always buoy her. He was not the type to gaze wistfully out of windows.

  She was almost surprised when he said “Hey” in a normal voice, when he turned around and his face looked the same as ever, not bruised or blanched.

  “You okay?” she said. The room turned from yellow to red as the traffic light changed below.

  “Hey,” he said again. There was something different about his appearance—it was in his eyes. An extra gleam. Maybe a fever.

  “Are you sick?” She crossed over to him.

  “I’m fine!” he said. “I’m fine!” That was strange, the exclamation marks, the insistence; he never exclaimed. The rest of the night proceeded normally, though, and by the time they went to sleep, she had forgotten the uncanny first two minutes of their evening.

  * * *

  If not a cafeteria, then at least a vending machine. Josephine set out with a sense of resolve on Wednesday afternoon. She had only knocked on a couple of doors when one of them opened abruptly.

  “Hello?” the bureaucrat said.

  Josephine’s initial surprise was followed immediately by shock. Because this bureaucrat reminded her so much of herself: the same sagging cardigan and sensible shoes, the same average height and average weight and unremarkable face, the same capillaries showing in the eyes, the same polite yet exhausted expression she knew she would wear if a stranger knocked on her door when she was deep in the files.

  “Hello?” the bureaucrat said again, her tone courteous and weary.

  It took Josephine a moment to locate the words: “Do you know where I might find a vending machine?”

  “I heard a rumor there was one on the sixth floor,” the bureaucrat replied. “I always just bring a cheese sandwich from home.”

  “Me too!” Josephine said, filled with hope.

  But the bureaucrat was preoccupied, in no state for camaraderie. “I’m sorry,” she said, gesturing inward at her office, beginning to close the door. “I have so much to do. Good luck, okay!”

  Overcome by nebulous longing, Josephine rode the elevator down to the sixth floor. The elevator doors remained shut. She pounded the DOOR OPEN button. Nothing happened. She accidentally pounded the 7. The elevator rose and deposited her on the seventh floor, which was identical to her own floor. She began knocking on doors. The third was opened by a relatively young female bureaucrat of average height and weight, with an ordinary face and a humble brown skirt.

  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.