Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

She listened to the message three times, harboring hope that the distortion of his words was due to poor reception on her end rather than his, but each time the recording delivered identical indecipherability.

She called him. He didn’t answer. She called him. He didn’t answer.

I’m not the one who garnished our meal with glass , Joseph said with an indecipherable smile. The air she breathed in her sleep blackened her lungs, yet her dreams contained snow, they contained forests.

Josephine awoke pregnant.

It was a lackluster dawn, marks from the couch pressed into her skin like the letters of a strange alphabet. Two of the plants in the jungle were decidedly dead.

She could feel it inside, clinging; almost hurting. She didn’t know how she hadn’t known until now. The weird hungers, the dizziness. And that irrepressible voice, always twisting her language from within — his wordplay met her unrest, unified now in one being. She placed her hands over her stomach; it was a relief to comfort another living creature. She felt her loneliness lessening retroactively, to know their child had been with her all along.

“Hello,” she said aloud, shyly.

Eel ho, the baby replied.

But “baby” was too tame a word for this vitality. Beast, miniature beast, precious perfect beast just emerged from the blackness of the universe, rich with desires.

Her heart beat outrageously, like a tin can being slammed again and again with a rock. The divine, terrifying math.

1

2

4

8

16

32

64

128

256

512

1,024

2,048

4,096

8,192

16,384

32,768

65,536

131,072

262,144

524,288

1,048,576

2,097,152

4,194,304

8,388,608

16,777,216

33,554,432

67,108,864

134,217,728

268,435,456

536,870,912

1,073,741,824

2,147,483,648

There was a twenty-four-hour drugstore down the street. She knew; she didn’t need to take a test. Still, at 6:03 a.m. she was perched on the toilet in the stranger’s apartment, watching the ghostly blue lines appear.

The joy overmastered the hangover.

“I am so sorry about the drinks last night,” she muttered, praying she hadn’t ordered a fourth.

Nast light.

Gast fright.

“You!” she cried out, elated.

By 6:56 a.m., she was in line behind a mother and three children at the only clinic in the neighborhood with early-morning hours. She gripped her health-insurance card in her hand, newly grateful for her job. She could have waited, researched obstetricians, made an appointment at a proper doctor’s office. But instead she’d thrown on sweatpants and torn out of the apartment as soon as she located the clinic in her insurance company’s online directory.

Because she wanted to start doing the right thing right away. She had been so negligent. She couldn’t wait a day, couldn’t wait eight hours, couldn’t wait two hours for someone official to say it aloud, acknowledge it and make it real. She could only wait four minutes, and then five, six — beginning to twitch with impatience — seven, eight, until 7:04 a.m., at which time a nurse in blue scrubs ambled up to the clinic and unfastened the padlock on the metal grating over the door.

“Doc’ll be here soon enough,” the nurse said, leading them into the waiting room.

“My kids got food poisoning or something,” the mother said. “Got chicken nuggets last night and they were all three up all night throwing up their brains.”

The kids giggled.

“Doc’ll be here soon.” The nurse gestured toward the plastic chairs lining both sides of the room.

Josephine sat down across from the mother and the children, who didn’t look like they’d been up all night vomiting. They looked alert, proud to have garnered themselves a trip to somewhere unfamiliar.

On the wall above the children, there was a poster:

BE SURE TO EAT THREE HOURS

BEFORE DONATING BLOOD

What’s it like to eat three hours? She was feeling impish. How do they taste? Like cotton candy or grass or concrete?

The youngest child, a girl, ran across the room and deposited a parenting magazine on Josephine’s lap. She spun and ran away, laughing at herself. Josephine smiled at the girl and then at the mother, who didn’t smile back. But the girl returned a moment later and climbed into the chair beside Josephine’s and pointed at the sky on the cover of the magazine and said, “Wha color?”

“You tell me,” Josephine said.

“Lellow!” the girl said.

“Blue,” one of the brothers corrected, watching from across the room.

Josephine opened the magazine to an ad for all-night diapers. “What color are these?”

“Lellow!” the girl persisted.

“ White ,” the other brother said.

“What color is this?” Josephine pointed at a photograph of a heart-shaped cookie.

“Lellow!”

“Red!” the brothers countered.

“What color is this ?” She pointed at a lemon on a page with a recipe for lemon meringue pie.

“Lellow!” the girl said victoriously.

“That’s right!” Josephine said. The girl leaned her head against Josephine’s shoulder for one divine instant before darting back to her real mother, who scooped her up and nuzzled her neck. Josephine felt slightly bereft without the small, warm weight of that head, until she remembered about her own child.

Eel ho.

The unmanageable euphoria.

Manamanamanamama.

“Josephine Newbury!” the nurse called.

* * *

Afterthe paperwork and the blood pressure and the scale and the pee in the cup, she sat in the cubicle on the crinkly paper, waiting. Unable to wait. Her hysterical heartbeat.

The doctor came through the door, followed by a young nurse in pink scrubs. Josephine clutched the paper beneath her so the women wouldn’t see her quivering hands.

“Yep,” the doctor said. “You’re a little bit pregnant.”

Josephine was ecstatic, and then faintly disappointed. She would have given so much for an exclamation point.

“Isn’t it either you are or you aren’t?” she said.

“Uh-huh. We just check the levels in the urine.” The doctor sighed. She looked as though she had already given up on the day. “Okay, so find yourself an OB. Blood pressure looks fine. Stay hydrated.”

“Is that all?” Josephine said. “Don’t you need to examine me?”

The doctor shook her head. “The body knows what to do.”

“Oh, thank you!” she said, immediately forgiving the doctor.

The body knows what to do.

* * *

Afterthe nurse followed the doctor out the door, Josephine lingered alone in the fluorescent cubicle. But not alone.

It all unfurled before her. All the doctors’ appointments to which she would take this precious beast of hers. All the times they would sit together, the two of them, talking or not, in waiting rooms or on trains or at kitchen tables. All the spaces that would someday hold them as this cubicle held them now.

She was crying.

Cub icicle.

Meld then who.

Eel ho.

* * *

Backin the waiting room, the little girl with food poisoning was screeching, trying to twist out of her mother’s grip. The mother was screeching too. “I’m helping you! I’m helping you!”