The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2 page)

“Capital H—Capital S—Eight—Nine—Eight—Zero—Five—Two—Four—Two—Three—Eight—One,” The Person with Bad Breath recited, as Josephine’s fingers located the requested characters on the keyboard.

The password pop-up box returned a red
ERROR
message.

“HS89805242381,” The Person with Bad Breath repeated impatiently.

This time her fingers were accurate, and the spreadsheet brightened before her eyes.

“Welcome to the Database,” The Person with Bad Breath said. Josephine could hear the capital “D.” “You have clearance only to complete your task.”

At that, Josephine smiled—hired, or so she assumed, and dying to tell him.

“My task?” she inquired, biting down her fool’s grin.

“Locate the entry in the Database via the search function,” The Person with Bad Breath commanded. “Use the HS number on the form.”

She obeyed, carefully inputting each of the digits. The cursor leapt to the correct row. There it was:
IRONS/RENA/MARIE
, followed by a series of boxes all filled in with an intricate combination of letters and numbers. Only the box at the far right remained empty.

“Cross-check the number and name in the Database against the number and name on the form. The form is always correct; occasionally the Database lags behind.”

The Person with Bad Breath paused, and Josephine nodded her acknowledgment. She felt extra-young, like a child going to school for the first time.

“Then input the date at the top of the form in the far right-hand column of the Database.”

It made her nervous to have someone watch so intently as she performed such a simple, stupid task, typing 09072013.

But then she noticed that this was tomorrow’s date. She weighed the benefit of catching an error against the rudeness of pointing it out, and mustered all her boldness.

“Shouldn’t it be
today’s
date?” she said.

“Place the file in Outgoing,” The Person with Bad Breath ordered, pointing at the metal file holder on the desk.

Josephine was ashamed by the visible shakiness in her wrist as she pressed the file into place. The Person with Bad Breath took a step back and, presumably, eyed her, though it was hard to tell with those reflective glasses.

“Next file,” The Person with Bad Breath said.

Josephine reached for the next file and opened it.
JEAL/PALOMA/CHACO
. She searched for the HS number; cross-checked (all correct); input the date on the form (09062013); placed the file in Outgoing.

“Flawless execution,” The Person with Bad Breath commended.

Josephine felt a rush of tenderness toward her new boss.

“Perhaps you will find this work tedious,” The Person with Bad Breath said. “It is also highly confidential. Not to be discussed with anyone at all. Including
him
.” The “him” added suggestively, almost aggressively.

Josephine nodded. She would have nodded to anything.

“Good skin, good eyes,” The Person with Bad Breath muttered, or maybe Josephine misheard, but, eager to please, she continued to nod. “HS89805242381, got it?”

“Yes,” Josephine lied.

Hourly rate $XX.XX (not so very much, but so very much more than nothing), benefits, tax paperwork, the stuff of life, direct deposit in case of a change of address, sign here, 9:00 a.m. Monday, and off she went, employed, regurgitated by the concrete compound out into the receding day.

TWO

Joseph was sitting on their bed. Their bed was out on the sidewalk in front of their building, surrounded by everything they owned, all the objects they had brought with them from the hinterland. It wasn’t much, but it was theirs: the bookshelf, the wobbly table, the plant, the suitcases, the folding chairs.

She ran down the block toward him, forgetting all the celebratory plans she had made on the train coming home from the interview.

“We’re evicted,” he said neutrally as soon as she was standing before him, breathing hard.

She kept her eyes on their stalwart jade plant as he explained how, moments after he’d returned from work, the landlady had knocked on their door, along with several of her brothers and a stack of cardboard boxes; she was demoralized, she said, by all the late rent payments and also by certain, um,
sounds
that came from their apartment with alarming frequency.

“Ha,” Joseph concluded.

Josephine flushed, with both shame and fury, remembering just a few mornings earlier, how she’d been crying—another day of searching for jobs, walking around worthlessly with nothing to do, wandering through the park in search of vistas, everything essentially the same as it had been in the hinterland (hinterland, hint of land, the term they used to dismiss their birthplaces, that endless suburban non-ness)—before he left for work, how he’d insisted on lying down on the bed with her even as she insisted that he leave so as not to be late. This whole summer, blinding Technicolor days interspersed with soggy days that smelled like worms. And during the heat wave earlier in the month, their apartment hot and humid with a heat and humidity unknown in the hinterland, the fridge began to make a painful thwunking sound every eight minutes, and in the dark she had felt like an alien and had desired him, her alien cohort.

At seven the next morning, the storage facility would pick everything up; Joseph had already arranged it.
THIS BELONGS TO SOMEONE,
he penciled on a scrap of paper. He wrapped the paper around the lampshade.

“We can’t just leave our things out here alone,” she protested.

But he had started off down the street toward the Four-Star Diner. In lighter moments, they’d speculated about why the Four-Star hadn’t gone ahead and given itself the fifth star. She hesitated, then trudged after him. He reached his hand back for her without turning around. The diner was close enough that from the corner booth they could keep an eye on the misshapen lump of their stuff. They ordered two two-eggs-any-style-with-home-fries-and-toast-of-your-choice-plus-infinite-coffee specials.

“I got the job,” Josephine remembered to tell him, her worry about how she’d keep the details of her work secret from him now displaced by the larger worry of their homelessness.

“There you go, kids,” the waitress said. Her hair was a resplendent, unnatural shade of orange, the exact magical color Josephine had wanted her hair to be when she was little. The name tag on the waitress’s royal-purple uniform read
HILLARY
.

“Perfect,” Joseph said.

“Anything else?” the waitress said.

“She needs a vanilla egg cream.”

Which she did.

The waitress winked and spun off.

“A toast.” He raised his coffee cup. “To bureaucrats with boring office jobs. May we never discuss them at home.”

Getting evicted had made him flippant. But her hands were damp and unsteady, slippery on the ceramic handle.

“Home schmome,” she said.

“Diagnostic Laboratory,” he said. “Agnostic Laboratory.”

He was looking at the diagnostic laboratory across the street. A truck had just parked in front, blocking the “Di.” Their favorite kind of coincidence.

“Good eyes,” she complimented.

Hillary was the type to let them stay the whole night, and they did, drinking infinite coffee and creasing the sugar packets into origami and eating miniature grape jams straight out of the plastic squares, trying to stay awake.

*   *   *

It
was Hillary who woke them the next morning, sliding a pair of pancake breakfasts drenched in strawberry goo onto their table. Joseph had pleather patterns from the booth’s bench imprinted in his cheek. As he sat up, he looked to Josephine like a very young child, far too young to be married.

“On the house, kids,” Hillary murmured.

Josephine stared at the large tattoo of a green snake winding up Hillary’s forearm. She couldn’t tell whether the woman was thirty-five or fifty-five.

“I tell fortunes, that’s why,” Hillary said, noticing her noticing the snake. “I’ll tell your fortune anytime there’s not a Saturday-morning breakfast crowd banging down my door, okay, sugarplum?”

Josephine smiled politely. She and Joseph didn’t believe in fortunes.

*   *   *

Only
a few of their things (both pillows, a folding chair) had been stolen off the sidewalk in the night. They arranged the small storage unit nicely, a tidy stack of boxes, the bed and bookshelf placed as one might place them in an actual bedroom. He slung a weighty arm over her shoulders and they stood in the doorway, gazing at their stuff. As he heaved the orange door downward, she kept her eyes on the jade plant—hopefully hearty enough to handle this.

*   *   *

It
didn’t seem to put the stranger off when they arrived at his door laden with luggage, as though they were ready to move into the sublet right that second, which they were. Within a couple of minutes, he’d explained the history of his name and shown them the entirety of his humid one-room apartment: a snarl of grayish sheets on the futon, whirlpools of old batteries and receipts and junk in every corner, a stately red electric guitar gleaming on a wall hook. A subway train strained past the single soot-colored window on an aboveground section of track, the same line that would moan them toward work on Monday. Throwing dirty socks and boxers into a duffel bag, grabbing the guitar from the wall, the stranger explained that the government was after him because he’d won the lottery, so he had to take a drive and sort some things out.

“If anything happens to those plates, I’ll die.” He pointed at four plates perched precariously upright on the narrow shelf above the mini-stove. Their green vine pattern encircled scenes of English gardens, maidens and gentlemen strolling among roses. Josephine nodded; she was always careful with things.

He left in a rush, gratefully shoving the cash they handed him into the duffel, and there they were, four walls, never mind the state of the toilet.

They collapsed onto the gray sheets. She held Joseph from behind and smelled his neck to block the other smells in the stranger’s apartment. When she woke she realized the gray sheets were white sheets that hadn’t been washed in months, if ever. It was dusk, the apartment plunging swiftly into a dimness deeper than the dimness of its daytime state. She felt woozy, overheated.

Outside, in the shadow of the aboveground subway track, there were no restaurants. They walked. With each step he tapped her left thigh with his right hand, a habit he’d developed in the early days of their relationship—the one tic of his that soothed her.

Eventually they came to a bodega: string cheese and peanuts and yogurt and M&M’s. They sat on the loading dock of a factory that emitted the richest, yeastiest aroma, an aroma that made them hungry even as they ate. They walked around the factory, looking for a door where they could enter and buy whatever was producing that smell, but the whole building was impenetrable. If not for the fragrance, the place would have seemed abandoned.

“Beautiful night.” He kicked his heels against the concrete loading dock.

At first she thought he was being sarcastic. Because she had just been longing for bread, greenery.

“I wouldn’t mind a tree,” she said.

“I wouldn’t mind a pee.”

Unamused, she curled her arms around her legs.

“The sky,” he comforted. “The graffiti.”

*   *   *

They
were standing outside the door of their sublet, confused by the stranger’s keys, when down the hallway a door opened a crack, a huge dark dog there, straining and snarling as though it had three heads.

Josephine shivered that instinctual shiver; she’d always feared dogs.

“It’s okay,” he said, jabbing the key harder at the lock, and she saw him jabbing a key at the lock of the cheapest room of the fanciest hotel in town, exquisitely exhausted on their wedding night;
’tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free, ’tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
; he wore an ill-fitting suit they had gotten at a store in a strip mall, where they were attended upon by the nicest man in the world, a man whose severe eczema pained them so much that they didn’t notice what poor advice he gave about how a suit ought to fit.

“It’s okay,” Joseph kept saying. Finally the key found its angle; he opened the door and she fell through it into the dank safety of the stranger’s home.