Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

And then, on the way out of the park, a mouse in the middle of the road, practically two-dimensional now, its mouth frozen open in a scream.

* * *

Shewouldn’t let the geese win. She would be brave; she would go to the grocery store like a normal person. She would buy food. She would cook food. She would talk to him. Tell him everything. They would make a plan. As they always had.

She walked and walked and eventually came to a grocery store with a filthy yet friendly yellow awning and a tower of pomegranates out front. She didn’t know whether pomegranates should be selected based on firmness or fragrance or hue.

Poor me granite.

Pagan remote.

Page tame no.

She grabbed three at random, and a few vegetables, a box of spaghetti, a chunk of Parmesan. The cashier’s collar was crooked, the left side jutting upward. Filled with pity, Josephine averted her eyes.

Back at the sublet by the highway entrance ramp, a number of the plants seemed to be dying. There was a text from her mother: All okay in big bad city? The bed was unmade and the laundry ungathered. Enigmatic odors arose from the trash can. In the kitchen, mice had already replaced the piles of turds Joseph wiped away this morning. She found it impossible to be fastidious nowadays. She filled a glass and watered a few of the limpest plants. Had they been given any watering instructions? Had Joseph said something about that when she wasn’t listening? She felt guilty.

But she felt bold too, as she sliced the garlic, as she turned on the gas, warmed the kitchen, that soothing smell of boiling pasta. She laid it out, this hard-won dinner, on the battered coffee table. He would be home any second now. She would hand him a beer; he would sink beside her into the stranger’s stained couch. They would eat dinner and then go to the movies or some other normal human activity. She couldn’t wait. She smiled. She stared at the door.

Josephine put the pomegranates in a bowl and placed the bowl on the coffee table across from her, as though it were a dinner companion. She sat among the plants and ate spaghetti and spaghetti and spaghetti until she was full. At long last, a little bit full.

She called him and left a voice mail. Afterward she was unsure what exactly she had said; it had been at a high volume, that she knew, and had involved a lot of cursing. For a second she felt fantastic, and then she felt dry, thirsty, and lonely.

She left the sublet, which now reeked of abandonment and dying foliage. The dull dusk had given way to a weird sunset, gray pocked with yellow. Weather for aliens. The temperature had plunged and a fitful wind blew highway dust into her eyes. She thought of the boxes containing her sweaters, her coat. The storage unit — she’d almost forgotten about it. She stood on the stoop of the building, shivered, watched cars travel up the ramp onto the highway. It was hard to believe pomegranates could grow anywhere on this planet.

She walked. She stepped over a small dead creature on the pavement. She stepped into a bar. At times you have serious doubts about whether you’ve done the right thing.

As her third cocktail arrived, she thought guiltily of her Puritan ancestors, walking clear-eyed and clean-livered through fresh fields. She pressed her bag against her liver; a honeybee buzzed inside her. You have a great deal of unused veracity . But the wooden bar was so beautiful, glass bottles the colors of precious metals, and now she was shaking hands with joy, hands shaking with joy.

“What I’ve been worrying about lately—” someone said behind her.

The bar was filling up. Dark rain falling hard in darkness. She wanted to know what someone had been worrying about lately.

“—yes, a house of gold, if you can—”

“—which is the main difference between being—”

“—three! Seriously, three !”

Who were all these people?

At the far end of the bar, a man in a gray sweatshirt drank something stiff. When she lifted her glass to salute him, his smile was maybe sinister, maybe benevolent.

Security is one of your major goals in life. Stop now. Drink water. Go home. But you become dissatisfied when hemmed in.

“—so she starts to study all this stuff about marital—”

Mary tail.

Martial.

“—caress!”

Care ass.

Carcass.

“—here alone?”

It was a long time before she realized this question was addressed to her.

“No!” The gin added the exclamation point to her response. You desire the company of others. You have found it unwise to feed yourself to others.

“So, what do you do for work?” the person persisted. Such an uncouth, painful question. A question like tapping on a bruise, pulling at a scab. The wooden stool melted beneath her.

“Whoa there, lady!”

She wondered where it was, the beloved voice that would transform “Whoa there, lady” into So some shady . She drifted toward the door on a glowing balloon of laughter and noise. Deep night had arrived. The sky was no longer yellow. She had to pee. She did a magic trick; she floated down the street elevated several inches above the sidewalk. The sidewalk was damp. There were parts of worms in the bottoms of her shoes. She had to pee. Someone grabbed her arm, jerked her back from the intersection. Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Wednesday, Monday, Saturday, Thursday. A laundromat, washers and dryers all filled with bright clothing, but the machines static, not spinning. A gorilla in the driver’s seat of a parked car. A transparent bird, a snagged plastic bag, a woman’s arm vanishing into a brick wall. Three luminous Coca-Cola trucks pulled up to a factory. An aquamarine flicker of tail in the narrow industrial canal; she’d always thought mermaids were limited to salt water. The cruel noise of keys, shoving, twisting, was she at the wrong door in the wrong building on the wrong street in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city in the wrong state in the wrong country on the wrong planet.

She fell through the doorway onto a couch in a jungle like the lady in the painting. Someone sat in the corner, slowly turning the pages of a book. Everyone knows that only murderers read books in the dark. Thick black hair sprouted from her nipples. She didn’t get invited to Trishiffany’s wedding. At the DMV they x-rayed her brain and discovered there an insurmountable fear of driving. A blind child crossed the street on a radiant tricycle. There was police tape across the door of her office. Some of your respirations are unrealistic. When she asked her parents how long they’d been married, one said A few months and the other said A hundred years . A demon queen perched atop a skyscraper glared out over a brown city.

Sometime after midnight: wakeful, hot, hungry, bloodshot, regretful, poisoned.

An insect whizzed near her ear. Bob — bob , went the insect. Bob-bob-bob , increasingly frenetic, enraging her. She flapped at it until it was gone.

Her bag, twisted on the floor beside the couch; her phone, dark in her bag. She pressed the circle and the screen lit to tell her 2:57 .

And to tell her: one voice mail from Joseph.

The insect was back. Bob-bob-bob-bob-bobobbobbobbobbob!

“You little insomniac!” she taunted, swatted.

The insect dropped dead, tumbled onto her thigh, its legs bent.

She screamed, then wept. She stood up and went to the bathroom and clung to the sink and threw water at her face.

The voice mail was ninety-three seconds long. For the first eleven seconds, he was talking. His words were muddied beyond recognition. She couldn’t even get a sense of his tone — urgent or apologetic or calm or excited or nervous or nonchalant. For the next eighty-two seconds, she could hear him moving around. There was maybe the shuffle of papers or the shuffle of phone being returned to pocket, maybe the hiss of a swan or a woman or a heater, the sound of breathing or the sound of walking, click of stapler or plop of pebble into pond, and then, perhaps, a door being slammed, echoing, oceanic, or perhaps thunder, and then another moment of fuzz before the connection was lost.