Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

When she emerged again into the relentless hallway, it wasn’t easy to walk straight, but the complete emptiness of her gut provided a certain courage, the kind of courage that enabled her not to care about the smell emanating from her mouth as she walked from door to door, jerking madly on every knob, knocking hard like the police when the knob didn’t give.

But no one ever came to open any door, and she kept going and going until at long last a doorknob responded to her touch, and she entered a small office with sickly pinkish walls, and said the name of the dark-haired man sitting at the desk beside a stack of gray files.

His back was to the door, his desk flush with the opposite wall. He turned slowly to face her.

Joseph: the one who spoke her best language.

But it wasn’t Joseph.

The eyes were a different color, the chin a different shape, the demeanor more delicate.

“Oh,” she said, “sorry.”

The bureaucrat nodded, his face neutral. His fingers lingered on the keyboard of his typewriter even as he looked at her. She pretended, briefly, that he was Joseph; that this was the one who mattered, the one whose file she was brave enough to steal.

“I’m looking for Joseph Jones,” she whispered. It was so hushed in there; even her breathing was an intrusion.

The bureaucrat gazed and waited.

She pulled the file out of her bag.

“HS89805273179,” she clarified.

The bureaucrat nodded a second time, his eyes on the file. After an apologetic glance at his typewriter, he stood up. He took the three steps across the office toward her, opened the door, and gestured for her to pass through first.

He led her down the hall, farther away from the restroom. He was not old — perhaps even younger than she — but already his shoulders were capitulating to gravity. He stopped in front of a door and knocked politely, perhaps inaudibly.

They were awaiting a response when she heard the footsteps again, the sneakers. This time they were coming faster, rushing up the hallway. It struck her that she might have led The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt right to Joseph. The sense of doom expanded, exploded through her capillaries. The door handle twisted from the inside.

She turned back to look at her pursuer as she darted into the office. But the hall was empty aside from Joseph’s doppelgänger, already hastening back to his own life.

* * *

Thesmallest office in the deepest basement. A quiet, apocalyptic place. It felt forgotten, as though the end of the world had already come and gone.

Joseph stood before her, shocked.

“You?” he said.

“You!” she said.

For the first time, she noticed that his eyes were bloodshot too. Less so than hers, far less than Trishiffany’s, but bloodshot nonetheless. It was unsettling to think she had been blind to such a detail. She examined his forehead, searching for signs of disruption to the skin, but his face was unmarked. Apparently Department “A” was better for one’s skin than Department “Z.”

“It’s god to see you,” he said. “But how in hell did you find me?”

“What?” she said.

“It’s good to see you, but how in hell did you find me?”

“You said, ‘It’s god to see you,’” she said.

“Why would I have said that?”

He laughed. She couldn’t control the jubilation that shot through her. For a few seconds she pretended he wasn’t going to die today. He looked vibrant, striking, tilting toward demon, his dark hair in a sharp peak on his forehead, his smile wry, vital, the monster who would howl at her deathbed.

“The cloak,” he said, reaching out to touch it.

“Don’t kiss me,” she said. “My breath reeks.”

In an alternate universe, she would have required toothpaste, nudity, a bed, a moon in a white sky, seven glass bottles lined up on a windowsill; fortified by all that, it would be easier to tell him what she had to tell him.

But instead here they were in yet another windowless office.

At least he was holding her.

“I’m pregnant,” she said to the stubble on his cheek just as he said, “You’re pregnant,” to her hair.

The beast remained silent, though, dozing even at this critical moment; she would have liked to hear what it would do with the word “pregnant.”

“So you already know.” Pleased, he pulled back to observe her face. “Are you happy?”

“You processed the file?” she said.

He raised his eyebrows, astonished by her level of understanding.

“I created the file,” he said, lowering his voice. “That’s what I was doing those nights away from you. It wasn’t easy to locate all the right information.”

A brave bureaucrat traversing darkened hallways, sneaking into classified rooms, while just a couple of neighborhoods away a mistrustful bureaucrat sat panicking on a stranger’s bed, walked panicking through a stranger’s home, filled up with ungenerous speculation.

“I’m sorry,” she said, almost too softly for him to hear.

“There were some hiccups,” he continued. “The file got booted back to me late yesterday. That’s why I had to stay here last night, to figure out what was going on. The form was missing one critical date. But I put the corrected paperwork in Outgoing early this morning. Our blastocyst will become an embryo any second now.”

Under other circumstances, she would have said something loving to him just then, would have found a way to celebrate, turned her fingers into fireworks: his disappearances magnificently explained, their child’s precious cells dividing and dividing and dividing inside her. But the other thing loomed, pressing down.

“I work here,” she began.

“You?” He was incredulous.

“In ‘Z.’”

“In ‘Z,’” he repeated, somber. “They swore you to secrecy too, right?”

“In ‘Z,’” she echoed, trapped in the three letters, unable to forge ahead.

He cupped her neck with both hands, the way he sometimes did.

How many minutes remained in their life together?

She said his name slowly, as though The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt wasn’t waiting on the other side of the door. She pulled his file out of her bag.

His gaze sharpened as he recognized it.

“I stole this,” she said.

“Why would you do that?” he demanded.

She couldn’t say it. She opened the file. Her finger, the same finger with which she had stroked him in all sorts of places, the same finger with which she had pointed to hundreds of thousands of other things. But now, here on this page, pointing, complicit with D10082013.

The Man in the Gray Sweatshirt was not beside the door when they exited the office. They ran down the interminable hallway that continued from the basement of “A” to the basement of “Z.” She reached for Joseph’s hand. He did not reach back. There was a force field of solitude around him. He ran a foot ahead of her, sometimes seeming like a stranger, sometimes like her twin. He refused to look at her. She wanted to know what it was that he didn’t want her to see: panic, selfishness, loneliness. Humble nervous pitiful human hope. She was thirstier than ever. The beast was mute. May the beast feel only a warm dark slosh. The file flapped, slapped her wrist. She tried to say something but her lips were quivering, unreliable. The straight unbroken line of empty hallway. Gravity sucked on their soles, pulled on their lungs. Behind them, someone pointed an invisible gun at Joseph’s back.