The Beautiful Bureaucrat (9 page)

Trishiffany blinked, then winked. “Let me know if you ever need a free hug,” she said. “I’m all about the free hug, you know? The other day I saw a guy on the subway holding a sign that said
FREE HUG
, and I was all about that.”

At that, Josephine (
introverted, wary, reserved
) retreated into herself, denied herself. She barely knew a thing about Trishiffany, after all.

“Thanks for the offer,” she said politely. “I’ll let you know, if/when.”

For the first time since Josephine had met her, Trishiffany looked uncomfortable—maybe that was even a slight blush beneath her blush.

“So, do you—have a boyfriend or anything?” Josephine attempted, wanting to change the subject, extend an olive branch. She’d gotten so rusty at friendship since they left the hinterland, where she had a handful of girlfriends, all of whom were far more talkative and confessional than she’d ever felt comfortable being with them.

It was easy to imagine Trishiffany in a kitchen, baking something full of butter and sugar for a man who found her delightful. It was easy to picture her someday soon soothing an infant with those huge breasts.

“No,” Trishiffany said flatly, all the bubbles in her voice popped.

An awful misstep. To make a nice person like Trishiffany feel bad about having nobody. She really was a nice person, never mind certain irritating traits. Josephine hesitated, unsure whether or not she should apologize.

“I’m all about living vicariously!” Trishiffany rebounded. “Don’t worry about me, Jojo doll. I’ve got everything I need, you know? One does what one has to do for oneself. Enjoy those cookies, okay?”

“You’re too kind,” Josephine said. She meant it so much that she choked up on the “k.”

“Least I can do,” Trishiffany said with a final wink.

*   *   *

Nobody.

No body.

Oneself.

One’s elf.

“Hello?” Josephine said into the solitude of her office. It felt as though someone had spoken. She looked at the Database. She looked at the files. She looked at the injured walls.

Eel ho.

She couldn’t cap the laugh that popped out of her. Immediately afterward she felt like a crazy lady.

Crazy lazy.

Hazy dazy.

“Hello?” she said again.

Eel ho.

*   *   *

At
4:57 p.m., The Person with Bad Breath opened the door and deposited a box of gray files on Josephine’s desk.

“Fifty-six for immediate processing,” The Person with Bad Breath announced. The breath mint tried and failed. The face seemed even more undefined than usual.

Josephine wished she were brave enough to say that it was a Friday, that she absolutely had to leave in three minutes. Instead, she nodded mildly and pulled the first file out of the box. Wasn’t there a fairy tale about a girl with a spindle and a room of infinite straw?

In order to make her task somewhat less unbearable, she imagined the people represented by the files, pictured them in various states of animation—a pair of eyes squinting, a hand selecting fruit in a grocery store, a body passing through a doorway. She entertained herself with the fantasy of meeting them—at, say, a bar with wooden walls, tin ceilings, bottles of glowing bronze liquids. She envisioned them rising up from behind the bars of the Database, stepping into her life, shaking her hand, ordering their drinks of choice, getting a little tipsy, slinging their arms over her shoulders, bestowing damp kisses upon her forehead, thanking her for her service.

Yet that fantasy could only last so long; eventually, exhausted, she gave in to the relentlessness of typing 09272013 fifty-six times, didn’t even search for coincidences, let the letters be nothing more than letters, the numbers nothing more than numbers.
FASAD/FADIL/MURR
 …
FISHBEIN/SAMUEL/BLAKE
 …
HOLGATE/CATHERINE/JOAN
 …
KAPLOWITZ/MICHAEL/EPHRON
 …
LAZAN-VINCENT/PAULINA/RENEE
 …
MCGOWAIN/THERESE/RAINE
 …
MCMURPHY/SHANNON/SIOBHAN
 …
MURCER/JONATHAN/KEITH
 …
PANIAGUA/YASMIN/JADE
 …
PRINCE/JOSHUA/DAVID
 …
SCANDURA/DAVID/SCOTT
 …
SCHMIDT/DIANE/HOPE
 …
SHAFIQ/IMRAN/SEAN
 …
SMITH/LYNETTE/ARLENE
 …
TOUSSAINT/PAOLO/IVES
 …
TROILER/JENNIFER/BROWN
 …
YAU/TZER/SUNG
 …
ZILBERMAN/EZRA/TODD
 …

THIRTEEN

On Sunday morning her eyes were still bloodshot, stained from the week. Her stomach awoke her, angry with emptiness. It was easier now than it used to be to disentangle herself from the heat of his sleep, abandon him in the bed. All these years she’d disliked that moment each morning when he or she first got out of bed, leaving the other; today she almost relished it, separating her body from his.

Lick our.

Lick or rich.

It was licorice she wanted, licorice she needed: licorice black enough to turn her insides green.

Not even the dirty bar of blue soap in the bathroom or the baby cockroach meandering down the counter could dull her desire. She brushed her teeth, drank a glass of water, noticed a stain on the low ceiling.

She used to always leave a note, but not anymore. “041-74-3400?” she whispered into the bedroom as she buttoned her sweater.

Outside, the gray light flattened everything to gray.

A pair of rats zigzagged across the subway tracks. They looked scared, searching for something down there. They made her tired. He was moved by subway rats. “They’re cute,” he had countered in their early days here, when she complained about the vermin in the subway, the savagery of this city.

Save age.

Savant airy.

“Hello?” she muttered.

Eel ho.

The train appeared, pressing a stagnant wind before it, arriving with a series of weary shrieks.

*   *   *

The
candy store was closed. It was 7:43 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The store would open in three hours and seventeen minutes.
Some of your aspirations are unrealistic
. She stood before the window, ravenous. There was an enormous glass jar of black licorice on display. She looked at herself in the jar until she felt as though the licorice were part of her face. Her skin buzzed.

Eventually she broke her own stare, returned to the world of the sidewalk, the very occasional pedestrians, a man in a gray sweatshirt passing behind her.

Back on the subway train, an elegant beggar—long white hair, loose dusty suit—listed foods as he limped down the car. “Egg sandwich. Spaghetti. Falafel.” He held out a paper cup and shook it to the rhythm of his words. A string of snot stretched downward from his nose onto his shirt, gracefully holding its slim shape for six inches or more. “Cheddar cheese. Tacos. Toast with grape jam. A chocolate milk shake.”

He repulsed her, made her hungrier than ever, and she turned, looked out the window into the darkness. The walls of the subway tunnel glistened with some kind of moisture.

“Skittles! M&M’s! Snickers!” the beggar begged. “Black licorice!”

She whipped back around to look at him, certain he would be staring at her, into her. But he was already pressing through the interior doors, shuffling into the next car.

There was a Sunday-morning newspaper abandoned on the seat beside her. Usually she wouldn’t touch a stray item on the subway, but she felt uneasy, desirous of distraction.

NEWLYWEDS, CHEF, ENGINEER AMONG PLANE CRASH VICTIMS
 …
Late Friday night, just off the coast … Only a limited number of the victims’ names have been released: Marvin Anderson (43), Hilary Bower (35), Jerome Chavez (67), Jillian Coleman (52), Alison Egret (27), Sam Fishbein (31).

Sam Fishbein.

Sam Fishbein.

FISHBEIN/SAMUEL/BLAKE

At this time, an estimated fifty-six fatalities.

*   *   *

“What
happened to your fingers?” he said when she stumbled through the door of the cellar. He was making oatmeal. “You like it with cinnamon, right?”

She looked down. Her fingers were gray, deadened, and it took her a long moment to realize that the newsprint had rubbed off onto her skin.

FOURTEEN

Early Monday morning, Josephine scurried down the long hallway, covering her ears with her hands. Only now did she recognize that over the past few weeks she’d grown deaf to the typewriters’ drone, but today she could hear it again, unbearably, the quiet roar of a million cockroaches marching. It was early—but not early enough to beat the typists.

“What’s wrong with the clock?” he had said from the bed after she rose in the half dark. He was disoriented, dreaming.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she’d whispered until he put his head back down on the pillow. “I’ve got to go in early today.”

“Is there a dog?” he murmured from beneath the butterfly quilt.

Now she darted into the dubious sanctuary of her office, where six high stacks of gray files awaited her, the weekend backlog.

Perhaps she worked for an airline.

She sat down. She opened the top file of the first stack.
AMATTO/ANNA/MARLENA
. She slammed it shut.

She did not pick up the next file. She did not put her fingers on the keyboard. She stood up. She sat down.

The Database hummed, hungry.

She opened and then immediately closed the top file of the second stack (
EATHER/HARVEY/JAMES
), the fifth stack (
PESAVENTO/ARTURO/BENJAMIN
).

What was she going to do. Was she going to sit here all day trembling, opening and closing files, ignoring the Database.

She reopened
PESAVENTO/ARTURO/BENJAMIN
. D09302013. Today’s date.

But if her theory was correct, “D” didn’t stand for “date.”

For the first time, she scrutinized the second line of the form. She’d seen it before, of course, thousands of times, but always just as a dense blur of typewritten letters and numbers.

G1(Z)01102003G2(B)01152003G3(E)01252003G4(F)3122003G10052003

She could see now, through her shame, that they were dates, the numbers lodged between the letters; she was stupid not to have noticed this before.

Understanding rushed through her, around her, enveloping her, suffocating her. She would prefer not to do this. She did not want to think along these lines. But, working backward, looking at line two (confused, still, by the puzzling letters throughout the row), couldn’t she perhaps guess that all those 2003 dates bore some essential relationship to the D09302013, notwithstanding the “G” where she might have expected a “B”?

But no. It wasn’t possible. If she happened to be correct, that meant that today a ten-year-old boy named Arturo Benjamin Pesavento—

Art jam save.

“Excuse me?” Josephine whispered.

Ex me accuse.

There was no way she was correct. She was obviously having a profound misunderstanding; a cosmic misunderstanding. Still, she was shaking so hard she could barely hold the pencil with which she was now writing Arturo Pesavento’s full name on a Post-it note. Why was she doing this, what was she going to do with this precious name once she managed to write it legibly?

Leg ably.

Beg lily.

“Hush!” she said out loud, realizing what she had to do, the only way to still her shaking.

*   *   *

The
Pesaventos lived in an old brick row house in a painfully quiet neighborhood bordering the cemetery, the sidewalk out front meticulously swept, the graffiti across the street only mildly offensive. A few slim, troubled trees fought upward from the squares of soil allotted them. The sound of a bouncing ball echoed down the empty block as though it were being dribbled by the last living person on earth, though Josephine didn’t see anyone dribbling a ball.

Arturo Pesavento was sitting on the cement stoop of the house. A plump ten-year-old boy with thick black hair in a bowl cut and a chin sticky with recent Popsicle. He held a portable video game.