The Beautiful Bureaucrat (11 page)

Josephine stepped into the first aisle. A second light clicked on, startling her briefly, followed by a third, a fourth, as she passed boxes of files labeled with multi-letter combinations. It was uneasily warm, dense with dust. She walked down the aisle, moving from lightbulb to lightbulb. Vast rows of
BLA
s, aisles and aisles of them, and then the
BOA
s (the
BM
s and
BN
s a blip), the
BOB
s, the
BOC
s. Finally she gave in and ran, lightbulbs snapping on to keep pace.

And here she was. The
BOO
s. The
BOOM
s.

Boo.

Boom.

Boomshakalaka.

Once again, exceptional good luck: The
BOOMH
box was not on one of the impossible shelves, those that receded away into the great dimness. It was on a shelf almost but not quite out of her reach. She stretched toward it. She felt vigorous, powerful, in possession of abundant inner resources. She engaged all the muscles in her arms; she placed the box on the floor.

These gray files were like all the gray files she had known in this place. As she flipped through the box, a file sliced her ring finger, but she paid no mind to the slender line of blood.

Here they were, her three BOOMHAVENS, the only three, right in front of the BOOMHOWERS. She was trembling.

Matthew James Boomhaven. Harriet Rose Boomhaven. Edith Rose Boomhaven.

She pulled the three files, spread them open on the unfinished floor. She reached into her bra for the receipt. The form hadn’t changed. There they were, the typewritten dates, the “D” at the top right, the “G” ending the second row, just as she had feared: D08171918, G10031872. D06271942, G01111876. D05181899, G05181899.

She closed her eyes and knelt before the files in understanding, in grief. She felt her fantastic strength draining away.

When she reopened her eyes, she inched toward Edith’s file, which she noticed bore only a small fraction of the chaotic text customary for the fifth line of the form: S*(8X&^P=+/–. Edith, never-more-than-newborn; Edith, whose life ceased within twenty-four hours of her birth.

Josephine rested her mournful eyes at the end of Edith’s third line, the line that began P/G01221872 and ended D08171918.

That 08171918 itched at her for a sluggish, stupid moment, until she recognized its source. Alert again, she examined the fourth line of Edith’s form, which began M/G04151875 and ended D06271942.

It was obvious now. Paternal death date. Maternal death date.

She wanted the first date on the third and fourth lines of Edith’s paperwork to be her parents’ birth dates; she craved that tidiness. But now she would figure out for certain what those dates meant—she would scrutinize these godforsaken pages forever until she understood everything.

Then, the sound of someone walking, the sharp noise of shoes coming across the massive aisles toward her, caged lightbulbs clicking on accordingly.

She stopped breathing, didn’t dare shift the form in her hand lest even that minuscule noise give her away.

EIGHTEEN

“Jojo doll,” Trishiffany said, rounding the corner in a fuchsia suit with matching stilettos. Her eyes were more bloodshot than ever. “You so shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s you!” Josephine said, relieved.

“You look terrible, Jojo,” she said. “What’s wrong, doll? Your eyes! So bloodshot!”

“I realized what I do here,” Josephine said, gesturing outward at the complex as a whole.

She hoped Trishiffany would probe into this declaration, would tell her that she was mistaken, that she’d misunderstood everything (silly Jojo!), that she wasn’t the bureaucrat queen of death dates.

Instead, Trishiffany nodded.

“Of course you did, doll. You’re plenty smart. It was only a matter of time.”

“I refuse.”

Free use.

Fuse re.

“Yes, we all have that moment. But if you don’t do it, Jojo doll, someone else will.” Trishiffany leaned against the metal shelf and rested her cheek on a box of
BOO
s. “You’re very good at your job. Very precise, very discreet. You can do it with more compassion than others might. In the town where I grew up, the man who owned the funeral parlor gave a lollipop to every child who passed by.”

The lightbulb glared down on both pairs of bloodshot eyes.

“Anyway, sometimes you get to see nice things happen,” Trishiffany continued. “Remember Viola Pink Olguin? Alive and well. Thirty-three years old. The chemo worked, the car didn’t skid, who knows. But bless her.”

“I can’t do it.” Josephine coughed; the dust.

“You’re not
doing
anything, Jojo doll. You’re just inputting data. Keeping things up to date. That’s all.”

“So who picks the dates?” Josephine demanded.

“Things get closed out when the time comes for them to get closed out. The same fifty-seven thousand or so people die in this city each year, the same fifty-five million or so die on the planet each year, Josephine Newbury or no.”

Josephine became aware of her own teeth chattering.

“Don’t you mainly just want to have a good life with your husband and kid where you don’t have to worry about being unemployed?”

“I don’t have a kid,” Josephine said bitterly.

“There’s two days’ worth of files drowning your desk right now.” Her words were severe but her voice was serene. “I highly recommend that you hightail it to 9997 and deal with that situation.”

Trishiffany met Josephine’s cold gaze, her eyes warm with sympathy; was that the sheen of tears?

Trishiffany retrieved Edith’s sheet from between Josephine’s fingertips, restored it to its file, picked up all three
BOOMHAVENS
, re-filed them, returned the box to the shelf.

Josephine covered her face with her hands.

“Oh, don’t do that,” Trishiffany said. “The oils on your hands are no good for your skin. By the way, have you ever tried PurePore? It might help you. It can be hard to maintain healthy skin under these circumstances. I’ve developed a daily skin regimen.”

Trishiffany was a wizard with makeup, but when Josephine looked hard, she could tell that her skin too was struggling, the texture of a breakout rough beneath the layers. The sight filled her with pity, for herself and for Trishiffany, stuck in this place without windows, pushing fatal paper while their skin and eyes degenerated, while they degenerated.

“Thanks for the tip,” Josephine whispered. “PurePore.”

“That’s what I’m here for, Jojo doll,” Trishiffany said. “Okay, let’s rock.”

Yets lock.

She pivoted on her stilettos and led Josephine down the aisle in the direction of the door.

*   *   *

Back
in 9997, Josephine stood beside her desk, eyeing the accumulated files, dizzy. A bead of sweat rolled from her armpit down her torso. She did not dare touch them. Like snakes. Handle with a stick, avoid skin contact at all costs.

NINETEEN

On Wednesday morning, Josephine did not get out of bed. She did not put on her underwear, her tights, her skirt, her blouse, her sensible shoes, her cardigan. She did not go the bathroom; she did not brush her teeth.

She had prepared her lie (a presumed fever, nausea, the beginnings of the flu). She would never tell him the truth about her job; she didn’t want him to be poisoned too.

But he scarcely seemed to notice her lethargy.

“Go on without me,” she said from the bed. “I’m not going to work today.”

“I see that,” he said. He kissed her forehead.

She awaited his solicitous questions, any expression of concern, but he just stood there pulling on his jacket and looking dimly pleased with himself, like a man headed out for a breakfast of croissants and café au lait with a ravishing mistress.

“Rest up,” he said with a wave. She couldn’t tell whether the words sounded hollow or if her own ear lent them that emptiness.

She closed her eyes, trapping her tears, and gave herself permission to float, to imagine café au lait or wine in a plaza in Spain, bright music, people dancing, someone encouraging her to dance. But all she saw when she shut her eyes was her office, three days’ worth of gray files devouring her desk, the bruised pink walls sighing, pressing in toward the humming computer.

By midmorning her physical state had slipped to match her lie; she felt feverish, queasy, permeated by illness. It took her half an hour to convince herself to stand up, go to the bathroom, drink water. There was a spider in the sink.

“Hey,” she said to the spider.

The spider looked up at her.

“Hi,” the spider said. “Man, you should really go back to bed. You look terrible.”

“Thanks,” she said, sarcastically or gratefully; even she couldn’t tell.

She lay in bed. A scrap of sunlight journeyed down the window well and across the butterfly quilt. The bed spun slowly in a circle, clockwise; then it spun slowly counterclockwise. The ceiling began to undulate.

Undue late.

Ulna duet.

Luau dent.

Dual tune.

Do la nu.

Duel aunt.

Laud tuna nut.

A dune lute.

“Please,” Josephine begged. “Silencio!”

Ice in sol!

Lice is no!

Slice eon!

An enormous black dog stood in a shadow in the park, waiting to attack, silent and beautiful. Panicking, she sprinted away and jumped into a car. She began to drive, even though she had forgotten how to drive. She ran a red, got trapped in an intersection, caused a traffic jam, merged onto a superhighway, one of those immense twelve-lane highways of the hinterland. She was going to have an accident but at least she was alone in the car. Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and realized she was driving a bus filled with a hundred billion people.

“You can quit!” she shrieked at the ceiling.

TWENTY

On Thursday, she commuted with Joseph as usual, in her typical tame skirt and cardigan, pretending today was a day like any other. After a morning spent sitting in her chair, ignoring the avalanche of gray files on her desk, not daring to move, barely daring to blink, she finally stood up just after noon, exited the room, and marched down the hall to the office where her interview had taken place.

“Come in.” The voice as dry as ever.

Much to Josephine’s surprise, the desk was covered with a white tablecloth and set for an elaborate luncheon for two, each of the four courses guarded beneath its individual metal dome. A carafe of water, a stainless-steel coffeepot, cloth napkins, multiple spoons and forks, a pair of salt and pepper shakers, a pitcher of cream, a basket of rolls.

The smell of the bad breath filled the room, worse than ever; Josephine half-expected to spot a small dead creature on her boss’s tongue.

“Pardon me,” Josephine murmured, relieved that she had an excuse not to enter. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I can come back later.”

“Please sit, Ms. Newbury.” There was still that vagueness to the face, the skin chameleoning into the gray walls until the mouth seemed almost to float unmoored in the air. The right hand gestured toward the second place setting, then grasped the carafe and filled both water glasses.