Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“Wasn’t the work order for the walls put in eight years ago?” Josephine muttered when the door was mostly shut. She spent half a minute hoping she hadn’t been heard, and the next half minute hoping she had.

She kicked at the stubborn bottom drawer of her desk, tugged it open, and slid the offending calendar in. She was about to slam the drawer shut when she paused, retrieved the calendar, reopened it to the correct month: a sloping alpine hillside covered in yellow and purple flowers. As foreign to her now in this room as a picture of another planet in another galaxy. She stroked the gleaming page. She narrowed her eyes at it, tried to see into the forest beyond the meadow; was there a woman, a woman carrying a child on her back, standing among the shadows of the pine trees? The glare of the fluorescent light on the glossy page obscured the image, and her eyes were weak from hours of work.

She clutched the tack, pierced the wall, hung the calendar right back up where it had been.

* * *

Itlightened her step, that minuscule act of defiance, on her walk from the subway back to the so-called garden apartment that night. She passed a take-out Chinese restaurant, stopped to look through the big window at the illuminated menu, contemplated the oddly appealing possibility of oversweet sesame chicken, felt somewhat hopeful.

But then she noticed a man in jeans and a gray sweatshirt standing inside the restaurant — his skin ill against the pale green walls — staring hard at her. There was an eerie focus in his eyes, as if he’d singled her out. Or he could have just been gazing vacantly out the window.

Unnerved, Josephine hurried onward. As soon as she began to walk away, the man in the gray sweatshirt headed briskly toward the door of the restaurant. She sped up, running the final blocks, unwilling to look back to confirm that he was following her, worried that a backward glance might provoke him. Only once she had reached the dubious safety of the dark stairwell did she dare a glance. The sidewalk behind her was empty.

She smiled a thin, scornful smile at her nervous little self. Still, it was a relief to stumble down the cellar steps, to throw her bag on the rickety chair and call out for Joseph.

He wasn’t there. She almost enjoyed her slight buzz of impatience, of doubt; when he arrived, any moment now, she wouldn’t take him for granted; “041-74-3400!” she’d say.

His phone went straight to voice mail. His voice mailbox was full. She had just hung up when a text message dinged. She seized her phone, but the text was from her mother: Apples in season went to orchard today you should be here. Pie!

She sat at the kitchen table. The basement was all shadows and earth smells. At least there were no cockroaches in sight. She crept through the rooms. Even the most innocuous objects had taken on an undeniable malevolence — the rag rug, the plastic trash can, the butterfly quilt. She returned to the kitchen. She drank a glass of water. She felt unwell. She was just transitioning into fury when her phone began to buzz on the table.

“Where are you?” she demanded.

The brief reply was a blur of indecipherable noise.

“Where are you?” she screamed.

This time the response was a mangled mutter. Maybe a trio of gerunds ( doing gluing screwing ) or maybe not. Distorted syllables, and then, clear as anything, an exhausted sigh before his voice sank back into the muck of static.

“I can’t hear you!” She could hear how savage she sounded.

He launched into a bunch of words but she only caught fragments, blips and fuzz.

“… sticksorhoe … portentgif … nessandheal … ed … oon…”

“What?” she shrieked.

He said something that seemed to end with an exclamation.

“What?”

“… so that—” Joseph’s voice emerged loud and perfectly distinct for two words, followed by the total silence of a lost connection.

The Four-Star Diner was packed with its Mondaynight dinner crowd, but even so Hillary hustled over the second Josephine stepped through the doorway. Her orange ponytail was brighter than anything else in that bright place.

“There you are!” Hillary bellowed. “Right this way, sugarplum.” She put an arm around Josephine and bustled her toward the row of red stools by the counter. She looked older than Josephine remembered. “What’ll it be? Tuna melt? Grilled cheese? Wait, no, breakfast for dinner — how about waffles? Pancakes? Strawberries, right? Bingo! Lady in need of strawberry pancakes! Listen, I’ll be right back, I’ve got a table of grannies that wants a million things.”

Hillary delivered the food quickly, with a wink, and Josephine ate quickly, almost rudely, the way Joseph always ate. The instant the pancakes were gone, she once again had that feeling of not knowing what to do with herself; the long fast walk to the diner had been something to do, eating had been something to do, but now the grief was beating the frenzy, the fury. Hillary came by to wipe down the counter.

“So, tell me,” she said to Josephine as if they were best friends. “Where’d he go?”

Josephine focused on the saltshaker.

“Oh honey,” Hillary said. “You look just terrible! I knew it the second you walked in the door. Actually, I knew it the second you kids spent the night here back whenever it was. I told you I’m a psychic, right? Hang around till things quiet down, okay?”

Josephine rested her forehead against her fingertips, felt the Braille of her rising zits. She drank a few of the mini-creams, flinging them down her throat like shots. The dinner crowd thinned. She watched a large family group clogging the exit, the merry chaos as they located the grandfather’s coat, the baby’s pacifier. Idly, distantly, she wondered if she’d ever typed any of their names into the Database.

She was still entranced by the baby, who had violent hiccups and messy curls, when someone gripped her hand and flipped it upward on the paper place mat. Josephine twisted around to find Hillary leaning over the counter, already deep in the study of her palm. The smell of cigarettes and Dove soap and syrup. The sleeves of her royal-purple uniform were rolled up, showing off the green snake on her forearm. Her hand was warm, almost hot, and muscular, and enviably dry; Josephine’s palms were always clammy. Though it was awkward, her fingers pinned down this way by a near-stranger, she couldn’t deny that Hillary’s touch felt as good as someone brushing your hair, someone massaging your shoulders.

“You have a lot of unused capacity that you haven’t turned to your advantage,” Hillary murmured, squinting at the lines. “Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.”

Josephine tried to pull her hand away, but Hillary wouldn’t let go.

“You’re critical of yourself,” she persisted. “At times you have serious doubts about whether you’ve made the right decision or done the right thing.”

Josephine put her free hand up to her neck, attempted to locate the knot in her throat.

“You’ve found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others,” Hillary said slowly. “You pride yourself on being an independent thinker. You’re often introverted, wary, and reserved. Still, you frequently desire the company of others. Security is one of your major goals in life, but you become dissatisfied when hemmed in. Some of your aspirations are unrealistic.”

Hillary stopped, noticing the effect of her words, and pulled a napkin from the metal dispenser, placed it in Josephine’s exposed palm.