Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

She looked down. Her fingers were gray, deadened, and it took her a long moment to realize that the newsprint had rubbed off onto her skin.

Early Monday morning, Josephine scurried down the long hallway, covering her ears with her hands. Only now did she recognize that over the past few weeks she’d grown deaf to the typewriters’ drone, but today she could hear it again, unbearably, the quiet roar of a million cockroaches marching. It was early — but not early enough to beat the typists.

“What’s wrong with the clock?” he had said from the bed after she rose in the half dark. He was disoriented, dreaming.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she’d whispered until he put his head back down on the pillow. “I’ve got to go in early today.”

“Is there a dog?” he murmured from beneath the butterfly quilt.

Now she darted into the dubious sanctuary of her office, where six high stacks of gray files awaited her, the weekend backlog.

Perhaps she worked for an airline.

She sat down. She opened the top file of the first stack. AMATTO/ANNA/MARLENA. She slammed it shut.

She did not pick up the next file. She did not put her fingers on the keyboard. She stood up. She sat down.

The Database hummed, hungry.

She opened and then immediately closed the top file of the second stack (EATHER/HARVEY/JAMES), the fifth stack (PESAVENTO/ARTURO/BENJAMIN).

What was she going to do. Was she going to sit here all day trembling, opening and closing files, ignoring the Database.

She reopened PESAVENTO/ARTURO/BENJAMIN. D09302013. Today’s date.

But if her theory was correct, “D” didn’t stand for “date.”

For the first time, she scrutinized the second line of the form. She’d seen it before, of course, thousands of times, but always just as a dense blur of typewritten letters and numbers.

G1(Z)01102003G2(B)01152003G3(E)01252003G4(F)3122003G10052003

She could see now, through her shame, that they were dates, the numbers lodged between the letters; she was stupid not to have noticed this before.

Understanding rushed through her, around her, enveloping her, suffocating her. She would prefer not to do this. She did not want to think along these lines. But, working backward, looking at line two (confused, still, by the puzzling letters throughout the row), couldn’t she perhaps guess that all those 2003 dates bore some essential relationship to the D09302013, notwithstanding the “G” where she might have expected a “B”?

But no. It wasn’t possible. If she happened to be correct, that meant that today a ten-year-old boy named Arturo Benjamin Pesavento—

Art jam save.

“Excuse me?” Josephine whispered.

Ex me accuse.

There was no way she was correct. She was obviously having a profound misunderstanding; a cosmic misunderstanding. Still, she was shaking so hard she could barely hold the pencil with which she was now writing Arturo Pesavento’s full name on a Post-it note. Why was she doing this, what was she going to do with this precious name once she managed to write it legibly?

Leg ably.

Beg lily.

“Hush!” she said out loud, realizing what she had to do, the only way to still her shaking.

* * *

ThePesaventos lived in an old brick row house in a painfully quiet neighborhood bordering the cemetery, the sidewalk out front meticulously swept, the graffiti across the street only mildly offensive. A few slim, troubled trees fought upward from the squares of soil allotted them. The sound of a bouncing ball echoed down the empty block as though it were being dribbled by the last living person on earth, though Josephine didn’t see anyone dribbling a ball.

Arturo Pesavento was sitting on the cement stoop of the house. A plump ten-year-old boy with thick black hair in a bowl cut and a chin sticky with recent Popsicle. He held a portable video game.

She was overjoyed. It had been so easy, to find the address online, to come here, to see him, to reassure herself. She had to stop staring, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.

“What you staring at?” he said, glancing up from his video game.

She was tongue-tied, deluged with relief. She would stand guard here the rest of the day, make sure no truck veered up onto the sidewalk, make sure he went to bed tonight in the same impeccable shape in which she now found him.

“You got a staring problem?” he barked.

“The … trees,” she said. “I’m doing research on the cherry trees.”

“Okay,” he said, relaxing a bit, returning to his video game, “but they’re crapapple trees.”

“Okay,” she said. He looked so healthy, so vibrant, punching away at his little machine, a million miles removed from his death.

“Die, dude!” he muttered victoriously at the screen. “I won,” he informed Josephine, arching his back to crack it.

“And how old are you?” she said, awkwardly.

He seemed to consider not replying.

“Eleven,” he finally said.

“Eleven?” Her throat tightened. “Aren’t you ten?”

He wrinkled his forehead and looked at her.

“No,” he said, almost patient. “I’m eleven.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Perhaps she’d made a mistake with the dates. “I thought you were ten.”

“I’m not ten,” Arturo Pesavento said darkly. “My brother was about to turn ten.”

“Your brother,” she repeated, as the Pesaventos’ home became extra-vivid before her. How had she failed to notice the sagging GET WELL! balloons tied to the window bars, the altar surrounding the miniature blue Virgin cemented into the pavement beside the stoop, the soggy teddy bear and the ribbons and the notes and the soccer trophy? Why hadn’t she wondered why a kid his age wasn’t in school at this hour on a Monday?

Arturo Pesavento’s older brother grabbed his video game and marched up the steps to the front door.

“Go away,” he snapped. “Please!”

As she turned away from the Pesaventos’, a man in a gray sweatshirt strolling down the sidewalk across the street looked over at her and smiled.

The cemetery was strangely hot, Indian summer loitering over the graves. Even the marble angel spewing water into the pond looked dehydrated.

And it was hurtfully beautiful: the soft undulating hills like those in the hinterland, the motionless trees, the orderly lawns. Four hundred and seventy-eight acres of grass and death, half a million bodies beneath her feet, her molecules presumably engaged in some sort of exchange with their molecules. The soles of her feet buzzed.

Names, endless names, names given an instant of attention before attention slid elsewhere; a familiar enough sensation for her, to be alone with thousands of names. The headstones glittered in the sun. Acanthus Path, Monarda Path, Spirea Path, Laburnum Path, Woodbine Path.

Lub burn em.

Would bind.

By the time she noticed her thirst, she was already dizzy. She forced herself to the top of a hill and sank down woozily in the shade of a family tomb.

She was going to vomit; she prepared herself; she was ashamed; the feeling subsided. She rested her head against the cool stone.

Fool throne.

She lifted her head back up. What was wrong with her, using a gravestone for a pillow? She wanted to apologize to the dead for her irreverence. She wanted to apologize to herself for apologizing to ghosts who could very well follow her home.