Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“Sorry, Mom, it’s been—”

“Just a sec, we’re repainting the guest room, did we tell you? We were getting tired of that purple sponge print so now I’m re-sponging it yellow. Or really more of a gold. It’s classy, you’ll love it. Let me put the sponge down, okay…”

She could hear her mother moving around her childhood bedroom, then the sound of metal paint can sliding across wooden floor and a soft curse. “Whoa Nelly!”

“Just tripped over the dang paint, but no spills,” her mother yelled.

“I can hear you, Mom,” she said.

“You don’t sound good, Josephine. What’s wrong?”

“Well, actually—” Josephine felt awash in relief, understanding. The woman who loved her most of all.

“Is it Joseph?” The awesome power of a mother’s intuition.

“Actually, yes—”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear it. But there are always ups and downs, you know? Do you have any girlfriends to talk to about it? You’ve got some girlfriends there by now, don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” Josephine claimed.

“Okay, so go and talk to those nice girls. That’s the best cure for this sort of thing.”

A man sat down next to her on the bench, too close for comfort. He was singing “Proud Mary.” She didn’t want to look at his face but she saw that his hands were many days unwashed. His right leg bounced frenziedly. Three bright white swans on black water, unless her eyes were wrong. Big wheel keep on turning, Proud Mary keep on burning.

“Who’s that?” her mother said.

“I should go, Mom.”

“Well I should go too, hon. Gotta watch paint dry.”

* * *

Sheran. She ran out of the park. She ran past something. At first she pretended that her eyes were making one of their errors, that it was a fallen ice cream sundae, a smudge of whipped cream, a spreading whorl of chocolate sauce, a drowning cherry. But it was smashed feathers, dark blood, swollen innards, wings extravagantly outflung, slime drying on pavement. She kept glancing back until she felt like a pervert.

Life.

File.

The beast whispered, gasped.

Mercifully, Hillary was on duty at the Four-Star Diner. Josephine spotted her hair through the big window, nothing as orange as that orange; she was leaning across the counter, talking to a customer.

Josephine forced herself to stop running, to enter the restaurant like a normal human being. People were sitting in booths, lingering over coffee and toast, chatting or reading the newspaper or looking at their phones. It was the most tranquil, mundane, indifferent scene in the universe.

No one seemed to notice her urgency as she beelined toward Hillary. And so absorbed was Hillary in studying her customer’s splayed palm that she didn’t notice Josephine either. The customer was a woman of late middle age, slightly overweight, with a soft concerned face; the type that struggles with constipation.

“… frequently desire the company of others,” Hillary was saying.

Josephine crept closer.

“You have a lot of unused capacity that you haven’t turned to your advantage,” Hillary said, squinting at the woman’s hand. “Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. Sometimes you have real doubts about whether you’ve made the right decision or done the right thing. You’re very critical of yourself.”

The woman released a heavy sigh.

“You’ve found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others,” Hillary continued thoughtfully. “Sometimes you’re affable and extroverted, but often you’re more wary and reserved. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker.”

“Stop it!” Josephine said, reaching between the two of them, breaking Hillary’s eye contact with the woman’s hand.

“Well hallelujah,” Hillary said. “Look who’s here!”

“That’s my fortune!” Josephine said, childish in her despair: She had come here to find out how he was going to die, and now she knew her artificial psychic couldn’t reveal a thing.

Hillary wasn’t sheepish.

“That’s everyone’s fortune, sugarplum!” she replied. “Anyway, I’m just a hobbyist.”

The customer was looking at Josephine with mild annoyance. “She’s a genius,” the woman said. “Every word she said, one hundred and ten percent true.”

“Even though you have a few personality weaknesses, you’re totally able to compensate for them,” Hillary informed the woman.

“Here’s another Zita for your collection.” Luminous with gratitude, the woman handed Hillary a thin wooden board pulled from her purse.

Hillary examined it, cooing with delight. Then she flipped the board so Josephine could see the painting.

In one hand the witch held a set of oversize keys and in the other an apple. It was one of those awkward folk-arty paintings in primary colors, the proportions all wrong, the head enormous, the mouth off-kilter. The eyes were big and messy, but somehow still looked straight out at you. Either the artist had made a mistake with the lines of the dress or the witch was meant to be a humpback. Josephine hated the painting. The apple looked like a handful of blood.

“Saint Zita,” Hillary explained. “The patron saint of waitresses and lost keys.”

“Did you know, my husband, he’s a plumber, there’s a patron saint for him,” the woman said. “There’s patron saints for frickin’ everyone.”

“Not for bureaucrats,” Josephine muttered.

“Oh sure there is,” Hillary said. “You just have to look it up in the index.”

“Well I guess I better shove off,” the woman said.

Josephine reached into her bag to touch his file. Her panic gave way to an excruciating sadness. Sadness that distorted her senses and transformed all colors into agents of cruelty. She closed her queasy eyes against their aggressions.

Then she was in a booth. Hillary sat close beside her on the red pleather. Was there or was there not a rose fragrance emanating from her royal purple uniform. Once more Josephine had the sensation of people staring at her. They frightened her, the people of the world. She was scared to look up, scared to observe the smiles and frowns on their faces. They were the spies of The Person with Bad Breath. The spoons were too, and the saltshaker, the napkin dispenser, the strand of hair; all of them keeping tabs on her, the thief. Again she shut her eyes.

“Jesus Christ, sugarplum,” Hillary said. “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay.”

A cold napkin passed over Josephine’s eyelids, cheek, chin. When had she ever known such kindness. She dared to open her eyes.

“I have this job,” she said.

“Okay,” Hillary said, waiting.

“I receive the files of people who are about to die,” she continued flatly. “I input their death dates into a database.”

She looked at Hillary, awaiting her reaction. Disbelief or horror or mirth?

“The summer I was eighteen,” Hillary said, equally flat, “I worked in a photo-development lab. People would drop their film off at the local pharmacy and it would be sent to us to make prints. My main job was to monitor the strips of photos as they rolled out onto the drying drum and then cut them into individual pictures. I saw the craziest things. I saw my best friend’s father in a motel room with a woman I didn’t recognize. I saw cunnilingus and fellatio, though at the time I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. I saw dead children in caskets surrounded by their brothers and sisters.”

Hillary paused. Josephine craved her voice.