Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s normal to cry. Everyone does.”

Josephine felt naked, ashamed, far too understood. She swiped the napkin across her face and stared at the unfair red hair. Was Hillary kind or cruel?

“I’m just the messenger, sugarplum,” Hillary said. “Are you ready for the good news?”

Josephine spread her hand out on the countertop again, but Hillary ignored it.

“Though you have some personality weaknesses, you’re generally able to compensate for them,” she announced.

Josephine waited. Hillary smiled.

“That’s all?” Josephine said.

“That’s plenty,” Hillary said.

“Where is he? When will he come back? Will we stay married? Will we have kids? How many? How long will I live?”

“Oh sugarplum,” Hillary chided. “You don’t want to know any of that.”

“Yes I do !” Josephine was alarmed by the screech in her own voice.

“Want a refill on that coffee?” Hillary said, standing up straight again and offering Josephine the dazzling, indifferent smile of any great diner waitress. She glided away as though nothing significant had passed between them.

Josephine left a huge tip, wound her scarf around her neck as many times as possible, and stepped from the pink and yellow glow of the diner out into the night, dead leaves racing down the concrete all around her.

“Don’t worry so much, sugarplum!” She thought she’d escaped unnoticed, but Hillary tossed out the penny-bright words before the door blew shut. “It’s bad for your skin!”

There was a soft knock on the door of Josephine’s office, followed by a hard shove, and in came Trishiffany, wearing a pink ball gown so wide she got stuck in the doorway, but she hardly seemed to notice. She worked a gob of gum on her tongue into an enormous bubble. As the bubble grew, it began to resemble some unidentifiable body part, a kidney or a liver or a uterus, something dark pink and veiny. When the bubble popped, bits of the organ flew back onto Trishiffany’s face and melted down her ball gown. Trishiffany giggled. Something was pushing her from behind, pressing her forward, and when she and her ball gown finally surged into the office, Josephine saw that the force behind Trishiffany was Joseph.

* * *

Inthe morning, Josephine’s eyes were bloodshot. The drain in the pink bathtub was still malfunctioning, bubbling blackness. She scrubbed her armpits with a washcloth over the sink and gave her face a brief splash. The artificial light accentuated the tense tendons in her neck. She felt scared of herself. Her fingers were unreliable; she lost her grip, dropped her toothbrush. Joseph’s voice mail was still full.

She got dressed for work, drank a glass of water, tried to cool her panic with ten deep breaths— disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside —before stepping into what proved to be a brisk, merciful September morning. She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking upward out of the stairwell at all the leaves on the brink of yellow, before spotting the postal notice on the door.

JOSEPHINE NEWBURY. SECOND DELIVERY ATTEMPT FAILED.

They hadn’t shared this new temporary address with anyone either. The minuscule comfort offered by the brightness of the day vanished.

* * *

Backin the office with the wounded walls, Josephine concluded that there was a woman carrying a child, the pair almost entirely obscured by trees and shadows beyond the field of alpine flowers. Unless it was just her imagination. Still, the possibility soothed her. But, despite the columbines, she kept finding herself stuck in a blank stare on Tuesday. She would realize she had gone whole minutes looking at a bruise on the wall above the calendar. She tried to amend this, tried to look at the world with precision, but eventually she had to admit that she couldn’t avoid or control it, couldn’t escape it. Squiggly lines writhed across her vision.

When a headache blossomed outward from deep within her skull, she scurried to the bathroom. She attempted to evade her own blank stare in the mirror by focusing on the intricate pattern of capillaries in her eyes, miniature red wires going in one side of her iris and coming out the other. She pitied her eyes as though they were delicate, abused animals that didn’t belong to her. Her skin was taking on the same sallow pinkish color as the walls of her office. She counted five zits risen on her forehead.

The bathroom door opened; Josephine froze, as though she’d been caught.

“Jojo doll!” Today her suit was orange with yellow piping. “Hangin’ in there?”

“Hi,” Josephine whispered, darting past Trishiffany and out the door. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to Trishiffany; today of all days she wanted to talk to her, to talk to someone, anyone, to say out loud, I am so sad, to rattle off a list of suspicions. You frequently desire the company of others. But just the sight of her — her friendly question, her bright clothing — uncapped a roar of fear inside Josephine’s head, as though all her defenses would disintegrate at the slightest indication of a kind listener. You’ve found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. It had never occurred to her that something aside from death might separate her from Joseph.

She spent the rest of the day working as diligently as a robot. A dutiful, mechanical heart.

The door of The Person with Bad Breath’s office was always closed, but today, as Josephine was leaving at five, it happened to be propped open. Through the crack, she glimpsed her boss talking on the telephone, feet propped up on the metal desk, argyled ankles precisely crossed.

“HS129285656855,” The Person with Bad Breath was saying in a bored, irritable voice. “One — Two — Nine — Two — Eight — Five — Six — Five— Six — Eight — Five — Five. ”

Overwhelmed by dread, Josephine rushed faster than usual to exit the building.

* * *

Shestood in the doorway of the cellar apartment and said his name seven times before accepting that he wasn’t there.

She closed the door behind her. Stood perfectly still in the entryway. She had no idea at all what to do with the next minutes of her life. It was best and easiest to stop here, not move another inch. Not think about who to call or what to report. She would have stood there forever, just blinking and breathing, except that soon she became desperate to pee.

She ran down the unlit hall to the bathroom, swearing to herself that as soon as she was done she’d come right back to the entryway, stand there still. She peed in the dark, wiped in the dark, flushed in the dark. On her way back to her post, she spotted something in the bedroom: a long black shape on the bed.

She thought it was an intruder before she thought it could be him.

Naked, and sleeping on his side, as he always did.

Her life had become so odd.

She shrugged off her cardigan, stepped out of her shoes. She lay down on the butterfly quilt behind him and cupped his body with hers, as she always did. A few minutes of stillness.

Sometime soon, sometime very soon, she would let go of him, would wake him up to demand explanations, pretending she’d never held him at all.

When she lifted her arm off him in preparation for the fight, he grabbed her wrist. She gasped, startled — he had seemed so dead asleep.

“Don’t go,” he said, pivoting around to grab her other wrist.

“Ha,” she said coldly.