Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

* * *

Ifnot a cafeteria, then at least a vending machine. Josephine set out with a sense of resolve on Wednesday afternoon. She had only knocked on a couple of doors when one of them opened abruptly.

“Hello?” the bureaucrat said.

Josephine’s initial surprise was followed immediately by shock. Because this bureaucrat reminded her so much of herself: the same sagging cardigan and sensible shoes, the same average height and average weight and unremarkable face, the same capillaries showing in the eyes, the same polite yet exhausted expression she knew she would wear if a stranger knocked on her door when she was deep in the files.

“Hello?” the bureaucrat said again, her tone courteous and weary.

It took Josephine a moment to locate the words: “Do you know where I might find a vending machine?”

“I heard a rumor there was one on the sixth floor,” the bureaucrat replied. “I always just bring a cheese sandwich from home.”

“Me too!” Josephine said, filled with hope.

But the bureaucrat was preoccupied, in no state for camaraderie. “I’m sorry,” she said, gesturing inward at her office, beginning to close the door. “I have so much to do. Good luck, okay!”

Overcome by nebulous longing, Josephine rode the elevator down to the sixth floor. The elevator doors remained shut. She pounded the DOOR OPEN button. Nothing happened. She accidentally pounded the 7. The elevator rose and deposited her on the seventh floor, which was identical to her own floor. She began knocking on doors. The third was opened by a relatively young female bureaucrat of average height and weight, with an ordinary face and a humble brown skirt.

Josephine was astonished, uneasy.

“Yes, can I help you?” the woman said with the clipped civility of a kind yet overwhelmed bureaucrat.

Josephine asked her second doppelgänger about the vending machine.

“Fifth floor,” the woman replied with confidence before excusing herself back into her office. “Enjoy!”

Josephine distractedly wandered the empty hallway of the fifth floor twice before concluding that she had been misled.

She hesitated a moment before knocking on a door on the fifth floor. This door was opened by a third bureaucrat: another polite young woman remarkable in her averageness. She assured Josephine that the vending machine was on the third floor. The skin around the woman’s eyes was flushed, as though she had recently been crying, or maybe just rubbing her eyes too hard.

Josephine shivered several times as she reentered the elevator and descended to the third floor. Already the women’s faces and forms were fading. Perhaps they hadn’t resembled her so very much after all. But — hadn’t they?

There she found it, at the far end of the hallway on the third floor. The vending machine was dusty with disuse. Most of the candy looked vintage, the bold colors and elaborate fonts of an earlier era. The rest of it looked brand-new, newer than new, candies she’d never heard of, futuristic white-and-silver packaging. She was grateful to recognize one item, the Mars bar — never her favorite but at least familiar. She slipped her quarters into the slot and punched the correct number. When she reached into the bin to retrieve the Mars bar, what she pulled out was a pack of lavender mints that looked like something her grandmother would have eaten as a child. She had no more quarters.

“Screw you,” she whispered at the vending machine.

On her way up to the ninth floor in the elevator, she unwrapped the lavender candies. By the time she arrived back at her office, she was addicted to their perfumed taste, the sharp edges of each pale-purple square.

Halfway through the pack, her tongue started to bleed, cut by the candy as it disintegrated in her mouth, sharp as bird bones. But all afternoon she kept eating lavender candies, inputting data, eating lavender candies, inputting data.

* * *

Whenshe returned from work that day, he was pacing around the room. No candles, no dinner, just a brown-paper shopping bag under his arm.

“Let’s go,” he said before she was fully inside. “Put on something.”

“Something?” she said. Her mouth was sore. She would never again eat another lavender candy.

“Festive,” he said. “Suggestive. Progressive.”

She wanted to scoff at that. Everything was in storage except for the meek clothing she wore to work. But she did put on a pair of oversize red plastic earrings.

They walked in the direction opposite the aboveground subway track and eventually came to the park. He led her around, searching for the perfect bench — near the lake, no gum gobs, not too close to an overflowing trash can. Several versions of the perfect bench were inhabited, so they settled for a less-than-perfect one, its paint peeling off in large patches. Still, they had a good view of the lake.

He pulled celebratory foods — a baguette and Brie, figs and olives and sparkling water and dark chocolate — out of the paper bag.

“What’s the occasion?” she said.

“Life.”

She tried to be delighted, but there was something peculiar about him. She bit into a fig, watched a pair of swans glide luminous in the transformative white light of sundown. One by one the pinkish lamps alongside the lake clicked on. The city was so generous sometimes. Here she could almost believe her windowless office in the gray building had ceased to exist. If no one is there to be mastered by the Database, is the Database still master?

“Aren’t the swans nice?” she said.

“You mean the swan?” he said.

“There are two.”

“One,” he countered.

“Two!” she insisted.

She blinked at the swans. As she blinked, the double necks resolved themselves into a single neck.

“You’re right,” she admitted, irritated by her used-up eyes.

Two kids rolled shrieking down the little incline behind the bench, their skin golden and grass-marked in the lamplight, while the father egged them on and the mother looked upward and outward, away from her family.

“Crazy little zombie bambis,” Joseph said. Sharply she looked over at him. She couldn’t read his tone, irritated or charmed, weary or yearning.

* * *

Evenafter a night of figs and swans, her windowless office in AZ/ZA awaited her. But on Thursday morning she felt slightly calmer than usual, more open to speculation about the people represented by the files. A woman with a name like Esme Lafayette Gold had to have a more dramatic life than someone named Josephine Anne Newbury. She pictured metallic green eye shadow and satin dresses in gem hues and tragic loves, before chiding herself for falling into clichés; Esme could just as well be a first-grade teacher who always wore muted colors and went to bed at 8:30 p.m. Or maybe she was a first-grade teacher who wore metallic-green eye shadow. How about Jonathan Andrew Hall? Was he as bland and agreeable as his name suggested, or was he filled with rage? Did he go by JAH and listen to death metal? Had the very agreeableness of his name served as the seed of his rage?

She yawned and stretched her arms and looked at the ceiling, which had fewer marks and gashes than the walls. When she turned her attention back down to JAH’s file, she screamed: The Person with Bad Breath was centimeters away from her desk.

“Goodness gracious,” The Person with Bad Breath said, bringing hands to ears.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Josephine said.

“Forgiven.” The smile was dry, yes, but not unfriendly. “I trust that you are thriving here?”

She felt only somewhat deceitful as she nodded her agreement. The Person with Bad Breath didn’t move to leave but instead seemed to be waiting for Josephine’s next words.