Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“I was wondering,” she began. “If … I mean, you forgot to mention what the Database is for.”

“We appreciate your curiosity,” The Person with Bad Breath said with a parched smile.

Josephine smiled back, relieved.

“But no need to be curious.” The door was already swinging shut.

* * *

Uponreaching the fiftieth file of the day, Josephine rewarded herself with a trip to the bathroom, which had that familiar urine-and-bleach smell of institutional restrooms everywhere. There was someone in the middle stall. It’s an uneasy music, the music of two women peeing side by side, and she wondered if the other woman was as self-conscious about it as she was, the stops and starts of her relief crossing paths with Josephine’s.

As Josephine stood to pull up her tights, she noticed the blood on the floor. She gasped — four, six, seven, nine droplets — how could she have missed them on her way in? It looked as if some small wounded creature had limped through the stall.

Her disgust morphed almost instantly into shame, and then disappointment, as she realized the source; the grab for gobs of toilet paper, the swift stuffing of the underwear, the inconvenience of being an animal.

But that still left the whole mess on the floor, three droplets now smeared by her shoe. She’d wait in the stall until the other woman left, and then she could clean it all up. She was standing beside the toilet, breathing as quietly as possible, when a hand came reaching under the stall door.

Josephine couldn’t cork the scream that sprang out of her.

The hand waggled a wet paper towel in its manicured fingers.

“I’m just trying to help!” said a friendly, insistent voice. “Take this and I’ll grab a few more.”

Engulfed in a full-body blush, embarrassed by both her blood and her scream, Josephine accepted the paper towel. She knelt down and wiped at the floor.

“Thank you,” she kept saying as the woman twice more brought her paper towels.

“No biggie!” the woman replied each time, Virgin Mary meets war-zone nurse, kind face, sturdy body — or so Josephine assumed.

When she finally slid the lock and opened the stall door, Josephine was shocked to find a petite bright-blond woman who looked to be in her twenties, a bubble-gum-pink suit straining against disproportionately large breasts. It hadn’t occurred to her that other young women might work here. She’d assumed, based on the handful of dark-clothed bureaucrats she’d seen scurrying around a corner or darting into an office, that all the employees must be half dead, like The Person with Bad Breath.

The woman stood blocking the entrance of Josephine’s stall, almost too close for comfort. Close enough for Josephine to inhale her candy fragrance.

“Hi!” the woman said, sticking her hand out to shake as though she didn’t mind that Josephine had just been wiping her own blood off the bathroom floor. Still embarrassed, Josephine offered a timid hand. As she shook it, the woman gave an odd little sneeze, trish-iffany .

“Bless you,” Josephine said, noticing with some alarm how bloodshot the woman’s eyes were. She was perfectly put together in every other way, but those bloodshot eyes revised Josephine’s guess of the woman’s age — she had to be well over thirty.

“Trish iffany !” the woman repeated. “That’s my name. My parents couldn’t pick between Trisha and Tiffany, so they went with Trishiffany. Trisha means ‘a patrician’ in Latin, and Tiffany means ‘manifestation of God’ in Greek, so whatever that adds up to. Anyway, Trishiffany Carmenta — pleased to meet you.”

“Very, very, very pleased to meet you,” Josephine said, trying to compensate.

“Good thing I came to this bathroom today!” the woman said, oblivious to Josephine’s awkwardness. “I seriously prefer the bathrooms that aren’t on the File Storage floors. I mean, truly, I hate the bathrooms on the File Storage floors. I swear the dust finds its way onto the toilet seats! It really seems worth it, just bopping one floor down — or up — so you never have to go in File Storage. But still, sometimes, out of laziness, I’ll just … but today I thought … something pulled me down to the ninth floor, you know? Speaking of which — how goes it in Room 9997?”

Josephine hadn’t realized that her room had a number, much less that it was 9997, much less that other employees knew she worked there.

“Fine,” she said. But the thought of all the hundreds of windowless offices in the building brought on a very unpleasant pressure at her temples. She squeezed past Trishiffany and beelined to the sinks.

Trishiffany followed, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully at Josephine’s reflection. Josephine noticed that her own eyes were more bloodshot than they’d ever been. Not nearly as bloodshot as Trishiffany’s, but still. She couldn’t stand to look at them; instead, she looked down at her hands wringing themselves together in the automated lukewarm stream. She wished she could choose cold water, the freshness of that on her bloody fingers.

“Five feet four and a half inches, right?” Trishiffany said.

Josephine nodded.

“A hundred twenty-six pounds?”

She nodded again.

“Thirty … two years old?”

She nodded a third time. If Trishiffany hadn’t been so gracious about the paper towels, she would have been put off by the woman’s uncanny accuracy.

“Sweet!” Trishiffany said, clapping like a little girl. “I am so good at that. But it’s not too hard in your case; you’re perfectly average, with a perfectly even face, like a robot.”

Offended, Josephine didn’t respond.

“I meant ‘perfectly’ as in perfect,” Trishiffany said quickly, but not quickly enough. “Besides, you know what the glossies say about averageness.”

Josephine had no idea what the glossies said about averageness. She examined herself in the mirror — her pathetic skirt, her sagging cardigan, the choicest of the few garments she’d rescued from boxes before everything was put in storage. She’d done the best she could for her first day of work, getting dressed among rotting towels in the stranger’s bathroom.

“Well, you look like Barbie,” she snapped.

“Ah!” Trishiffany yelped ecstatically. “ Thank you!”

She insisted on walking Josephine back to 9997; as they walked, Trishiffany combated the permanent flat drone of the hallway with a crescendoing monologue about how much she loved getting pedicures and going to ladies’ nights and musicals and stuff, why not live it up while you’ve got life, right—

“What’s that sound?” Josephine was forced to interrupt after waiting fruitlessly for an opening in her speech.

“What sound?” Trishiffany said, a smile from memories of a popular musical still radiant on her face.

Josephine spread her arms outward to indicate the entire hallway.

“Oh, that sound!” Trishiffany almost giggled. “I never even hear it anymore. That’s the typewriters.”

“The typewriters?”

“It could drive you mad, couldn’t it?” Trishiffany said lightly. “But don’t worry, it just blends into your brain. You’ll stop hearing it after you’ve been here a little while. It’s one of those things you get used to, like the way there’s never good cell reception.” And Trishiffany carried on about her favorite bar, the firemen were always there on Thursdays, but since Josephine was married maybe she might not be up for that kind of thing? Oh yes, Trishiffany had noticed the wedding band first thing, duh!

“Not to icky-pick,” Trishiffany said as Josephine pushed open the door of 9997, “but you really shouldn’t leave your door unlocked ever. Even if you’re just going to the bathroom, you know?”