Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“Open the top file,” The Person with Bad Breath instructed, directing her to the chair behind the desk.

She opened the file to a sheet of paper covered in dense typewritten text:

The file contained four equally dizzying pages after the first. As Josephine tried to focus on them, a headache took root behind her eyes.

The Person with Bad Breath pressed a colorless hand down onto the pages.

“Only the topmost section of the top sheet concerns you, Ms. Newbury. You never need look below the line containing the name and the date.”

Her headache retreated slightly.

The Person with Bad Breath tapped the computer’s mouse. The screen came to life: a dim and frozen spreadsheet behind a pop-up box demanding a clearance password.

“Capital H — Capital S — Eight — Nine — Eight — Zero — Five — Two — Four — Two — Three — Eight — One,” The Person with Bad Breath recited, as Josephine’s fingers located the requested characters on the keyboard.

The password pop-up box returned a red ERROR message.

“HS89805242381,” The Person with Bad Breath repeated impatiently.

This time her fingers were accurate, and the spreadsheet brightened before her eyes.

“Welcome to the Database,” The Person with Bad Breath said. Josephine could hear the capital “D.” “You have clearance only to complete your task.”

At that, Josephine smiled — hired, or so she assumed, and dying to tell him.

“My task?” she inquired, biting down her fool’s grin.

“Locate the entry in the Database via the search function,” The Person with Bad Breath commanded. “Use the HS number on the form.”

She obeyed, carefully inputting each of the digits. The cursor leapt to the correct row. There it was: IRONS/RENA/MARIE, followed by a series of boxes all filled in with an intricate combination of letters and numbers. Only the box at the far right remained empty.

“Cross-check the number and name in the Database against the number and name on the form. The form is always correct; occasionally the Database lags behind.”

The Person with Bad Breath paused, and Josephine nodded her acknowledgment. She felt extra-young, like a child going to school for the first time.

“Then input the date at the top of the form in the far right-hand column of the Database.”

It made her nervous to have someone watch so intently as she performed such a simple, stupid task, typing 09072013.

But then she noticed that this was tomorrow’s date. She weighed the benefit of catching an error against the rudeness of pointing it out, and mustered all her boldness.

“Shouldn’t it be today’s date?” she said.

“Place the file in Outgoing,” The Person with Bad Breath ordered, pointing at the metal file holder on the desk.

Josephine was ashamed by the visible shakiness in her wrist as she pressed the file into place. The Person with Bad Breath took a step back and, presumably, eyed her, though it was hard to tell with those reflective glasses.

“Next file,” The Person with Bad Breath said.

Josephine reached for the next file and opened it. JEAL/PALOMA/CHACO. She searched for the HS number; cross-checked (all correct); input the date on the form (09062013); placed the file in Outgoing.

“Flawless execution,” The Person with Bad Breath commended.

Josephine felt a rush of tenderness toward her new boss.

“Perhaps you will find this work tedious,” The Person with Bad Breath said. “It is also highly confidential. Not to be discussed with anyone at all. Including him .” The “him” added suggestively, almost aggressively.

Josephine nodded. She would have nodded to anything.

“Good skin, good eyes,” The Person with Bad Breath muttered, or maybe Josephine misheard, but, eager to please, she continued to nod. “HS89805242381, got it?”

“Yes,” Josephine lied.

Hourly rate $XX.XX (not so very much, but so very much more than nothing), benefits, tax paperwork, the stuff of life, direct deposit in case of a change of address, sign here, 9:00 a.m. Monday, and off she went, employed, regurgitated by the concrete compound out into the receding day.

Joseph was sitting on their bed. Their bed was out on the sidewalk in front of their building, surrounded by everything they owned, all the objects they had brought with them from the hinterland. It wasn’t much, but it was theirs: the bookshelf, the wobbly table, the plant, the suitcases, the folding chairs.

She ran down the block toward him, forgetting all the celebratory plans she had made on the train coming home from the interview.

“We’re evicted,” he said neutrally as soon as she was standing before him, breathing hard.

She kept her eyes on their stalwart jade plant as he explained how, moments after he’d returned from work, the landlady had knocked on their door, along with several of her brothers and a stack of cardboard boxes; she was demoralized, she said, by all the late rent payments and also by certain, um, sounds that came from their apartment with alarming frequency.

“Ha,” Joseph concluded.

Josephine flushed, with both shame and fury, remembering just a few mornings earlier, how she’d been crying — another day of searching for jobs, walking around worthlessly with nothing to do, wandering through the park in search of vistas, everything essentially the same as it had been in the hinterland (hinterland, hint of land, the term they used to dismiss their birthplaces, that endless suburban non-ness) — before he left for work, how he’d insisted on lying down on the bed with her even as she insisted that he leave so as not to be late. This whole summer, blinding Technicolor days interspersed with soggy days that smelled like worms. And during the heat wave earlier in the month, their apartment hot and humid with a heat and humidity unknown in the hinterland, the fridge began to make a painful thwunking sound every eight minutes, and in the dark she had felt like an alien and had desired him, her alien cohort.

At seven the next morning, the storage facility would pick everything up; Joseph had already arranged it. THIS BELONGS TO SOMEONE, he penciled on a scrap of paper. He wrapped the paper around the lampshade.

“We can’t just leave our things out here alone,” she protested.

But he had started off down the street toward the Four-Star Diner. In lighter moments, they’d speculated about why the Four-Star hadn’t gone ahead and given itself the fifth star. She hesitated, then trudged after him. He reached his hand back for her without turning around. The diner was close enough that from the corner booth they could keep an eye on the misshapen lump of their stuff. They ordered two two-eggs-any-style-with-home-fries-and-toast-of-your-choice-plus-infinite-coffee specials.

“I got the job,” Josephine remembered to tell him, her worry about how she’d keep the details of her work secret from him now displaced by the larger worry of their homelessness.

“There you go, kids,” the waitress said. Her hair was a resplendent, unnatural shade of orange, the exact magical color Josephine had wanted her hair to be when she was little. The name tag on the waitress’s royal-purple uniform read HILLARY.

“Perfect,” Joseph said.

“Anything else?” the waitress said.

“She needs a vanilla egg cream.”