But here she was: pregnant.
* * *
Walking to the subway, she saw a pot of marigolds atop a parked car. One can always build one’s life. The cloak protected her just enough from the chill of the October morning. She stroked “Your Growing Baby” in her bag. Rich with life. What if you had a moment of absolute happiness right now, right this very second. Come on, give it a try.
And there it was: a swell of happiness, a flash of happiness.
Happy nest.
Ha penis.
She could live with this, with the gray files piled on her desk; she could be the one who ferried names from this side to the other. She could—she could see dignity in that. She would steal a name from the Database and give it to the beast. A good, solid, strong, fanciful, flexible name. A name for a beast to do with as it wished—gnaw on, or cast aside.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Josephine twisted the key and prepared to press all her weight against the door of her office. She assumed the accumulated files had reached the doorway by now, blocking passage inward.
But the door opened easily. She was not greeted by the mountain of files that had ruled her imagination. Instead, four tame stacks awaited her on the desk. The calendar was still tacked to the wall as she had left it. The Database hummed as it always hummed. Today the sound struck her as neutral; perhaps even benevolent.
Bene violent.
Bone el vent.
The month had turned, but she didn’t flip the calendar. She put her hand on the wall, leaned closer, looked anew for the woman and child in the shadow of the trees.
HS89805242381: This time, her fingertips relished the familiarity of the password.
She picked up the file of EMMITT JUDD ARCHINGTON.
ACHING TORN.
CHANTING OR.
She searched the HS number, cross-checked the information, input the date. Her first file since the emergency batch of airplane fatalities; the first file she had ever knowingly processed.
It was less harrowing than she had anticipated.
She remained calm as the names came rushing up at her. She hardly thought about the fact that each of these files represented someone who had once been born to a mother. She averted her eyes from the line containing the birth dates, protected herself from the ages: the thirty-one-year-old, the seventeen-year-old, the two-year-old. Every name she encountered was a possible name for the beast.
By the time she logged the twentieth file, it was as though she’d never stopped.
She put her hands under her shirt, savored the remarkable warmth.
The silence in her office was so complete she began to believe that everyone had left the building and the city and the world. Only she and her beast remained on this abandoned planet. The bathroom too had become a place of profound and uncanny solitude; she hurried away from there, back to her familiar bruised walls. She started when the heater in the corner released its first hiss of the season.
She was starving before noon. She sat at her desk eating an oversize deli sandwich, bought to nourish life. Avocado, spinach. As though she hadn’t spent all morning doing what she’d been doing. As though she was only the most minor of accomplices.
While she ate, she flipped through “Your Growing Baby,” examined the timeline: zygote to blastocyst to embryo to fetus to baby. She looked again at the illustration of week five. She willed the beast to share with her its deep dark coziness. But then she felt ashamed that she, the adult, the mother, was the one seeking comfort; how ridiculous, to ask her own offspring to serve as her shelter.
Even after she finished the sandwich, a vast hunger haunted her.
GRABER/AUDREY/COYNE
GRINNELL/LUCY/SPADE
GUJJAR/HAKEEM/MIR
GURLEY/KAREN/JEAN
HAAGENSEN/DONALD/WINTERS
HABICHT/GERTRUDE/ANNE
HACHEZ/PAULINE/CHIOSSONE
HAGGAS/JAMES/CONNOR
HEAGEL/WILLIAM/ARCHIBALD
HEIERMANN/IRA/ABRAHAM
HIGA/FELIX/CESAR
HOEZEL/JOSEPH/ALEXANDER
HYUN/MIN/SEO
IANACONE/JOAO/PAOLO
IGNOWSKI/ALAN/ALEKSANDER
IKZDA/JENNIFER/SUN
ILIFF/GEORGE/EVAN
IMAIZUMI/KATSUMI/REI
INNIS/GREGORY/BARRON
IRESON/STELLA/JANE
IVASKA/ELMA/ADELE
IWATA/KIYOJI/MASAKI
JABARA/AZARIA/LEYA
JACKSON/MATTHEW/SHANE
JAISHANKAR/AARAL/DAEVI
JAMES/ANIKA/SUMMER
JEANBATISTE/MARCUS/HENRY
JEHLE/LUELLA/WINONA
JEONG/KIMBERLY/SARA
JI/MARVIN/MIN
JIMENEZ/DOLORES/DELGADO
JOACHIM/HEKTOR/BORREGO
JOLIVETTE/ZENA/CRYSTAL
JONCAS/MARION/CLAXTON
JONES/ELIZABETH/CAROL
JONES/JOSEPH/DAVID
JONES/JOSEPH/DAVID.
JOSEPH DAVID JONES.
There are plenty of Joseph Joneses. Plenty of Joseph David Joneses. But the birth date was there. And the death date. Today’s date. 10082013.
TWENTY-EIGHT
She sat at her desk in the perfect silence. Her body was doing strange and terrible things—her heart, her bowels, her sweat glands—that made it very difficult to think.
This gray file. Just like billions of others. Its pages cool and quiet. Yet his. His blood and spine, his teeth and hands.
Take it and exit.
She seized the file and ran to the door.
No. Hide it first.
Her fingers were quaking, nearly useless, but she managed to zip the file into her bag. In her brain, the sound of heavy rain.
Don’t forget your cloak.
Now go, go, go.
She clutched her bag and ran out into the hallway.
But appear calm!
Against all instinct, she slowed. She exited the building at a sedate pace and strolled down the block, her muscles aching from the restraint.
When she reached the corner, she glanced back at the building. She broke into a run, clinging to the contours of his file inside her bag.
File.
Life.
How had she never noticed?
She called him as she ran. Again and again the automated lady offered the intolerable option of leaving a voice mail.
She ran for a long time, not daring to look behind her. She had stolen something quite precious, the most precious thing on the planet; who knew what they might do to get it back.
Sunbeams reflected brutally off windshields, cars transformed into machines for harassing sensitive eyes, a sudden-onset headache. Her hazy vision interpreted a run-down apartment building as a cathedral. She ran past an old lady in a wheelchair missing one purple shoe. A large man carrying a miniature pumpkin. A naked doll with male genitalia. A line of children in angel wings marching across the street, calling out to one another in Spanish. The whole inexplicable world reminded her of him.
She had no plan.
She had removed his file from the premises—what greater act of courage can be expected of a bureaucrat?
A subway train rumbled beneath the sidewalk, vibrating the lampposts and the blue mailbox and the geraniums on someone’s stoop, shattering the illusion that this street was anything more than a humble layer atop tunnels and sewers, rats and rot.
She needed a safe place. Was any place safe?
Only he had been there to witness the dustbin of green shards when she shattered the stranger’s heirloom plate.
At least a quiet place. Water, birds.
File!
File!
Life!
Life!
File!
The precious beast sounded agitated, almost frantic.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Josephine murmured unconvincingly.
A young couple strolling in the opposite direction stared at her.
* * *
It had become a soft and
mild day, no day for a chase. And there was nothing to back up her suspicion that she was being pursued as she entered the park, no screeching car brakes or heavy breathing behind her.
TWENTY-NINE
She half-expected to find him on the less-than-perfect bench, perhaps holding his phone out to the water, recording the sound of swans. Only when he wasn’t there did she acknowledge how much she had been anticipating his presence.
Instead, just the empty bench, its paint in worse shape than when she and he had eaten figs here less than three weeks before.
She sat exactly where she had sat that night. If she could scoot a tiny bit in time, she’d be sitting next to him: unpregnant, innocent, ignorant.
The day was becoming more golden by the minute. Glimmering fall weather that denied death as sunbeams glossed dying leaves. On a log poking out of the radiant water, three turtles stretched their necks up toward the light. She imitated them, the sun a tranquilizing balm on the hidden skin of her throat. But then she tipped her chin back down, frightened by the lulling brilliance of this day, the inappropriate and offensive beauty of the world.
What next?
Life, the beast whimpered. File.
She unzipped her bag and confirmed the presence of his file, though there was nowhere else it could be.
He could die by heart attack.
He could die by car, by bus, by truck, by train.
He could die by gunshot.
He could die by suicide.
She panicked.
* * *
“911, what is your emergency?”
“My husband is going to die today.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“From the park, but—”
“Which park?”
“The big one, the main park, but—”
“Where in the park?”
“By the lake, but he’s—”
“Which lake?”
“The lake with the swans.”
“With the swans?”
“Where people always feed the swans.”
“What are the cross streets?”
“It’s in the middle of the park. But my husband isn’t here.”
“Didn’t you say that you are concerned for his life?”
“But he’s not here. I don’t know where he is. But I know he’s going to die.”
“Ma’am,” the dispatcher said gently. “Ma’am. Do you need an ambulance?”
“No.”
“Do you need the police?”
“I need someone to find my husband.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday?” The dispatcher paused briefly. “You can file a Missing Persons Report with the Missing Persons Unit. I can give you the number. Do you have a pen and paper?”
Her hand scrambled around in her bag, located a wooden pencil with a broken point. There was no paper except for the form in Joseph’s file.
“What makes you believe that your husband’s life is in danger?” the dispatcher inquired, possibly out of professional obligation, possibly out of curiosity.
Josephine ended the call.
* * *
Aside from the paved path, the distant sound of sirens, the buildings visible over the trees, this could be a lake in the wilderness of the hinterland. Trapped underwater by sticky mud in the shallows, orange leaves more vivid than any other leaves. She looked back at her parents as she ran down the trail at dusk. “Will there be a troll?” she hollered, rounding the rock outcropping, passing out of their sight.
“Josephine!” her mother said, speaking too loudly into the cell phone. The word, the warmth, was enough to unleash a swift quartet of tears. “Josephine?”
“Hi,” she managed to say. Where to begin. She touched her stomach, hot with grandchild.
“I have been thinking about you! Did you get my text?”
“Yes,” she said, not recalling any text. How to ask for help. What kind of help to ask for.
“I’d be so happy if you’d text back to my texts,” her mother said.
“Sorry, Mom, it’s been—”
“Just a sec, we’re repainting the guest room, did we tell you? We were getting tired of that purple sponge print so now I’m re-sponging it yellow. Or really more of a gold. It’s classy, you’ll love it. Let me put the sponge down, okay…”
She could hear her mother moving around her childhood bedroom, then the sound of metal paint can sliding across wooden floor and a soft curse. “Whoa Nelly!”
“Just tripped over the dang paint, but no spills,” her mother yelled.
“I can hear you, Mom,” she said.
“You don’t sound good, Josephine. What’s wrong?”
“Well, actually—” Josephine felt awash in relief, understanding. The woman who loved her most of all.
“Is it Joseph?” The awesome power of a mother’s intuition.
“Actually, yes—”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear it. But there are always ups and downs, you know? Do you have any girlfriends to talk to about it? You’ve got some girlfriends there by now, don’t you?”
“Sure I do,” Josephine claimed.
“Okay, so go and talk to those nice girls. That’s the best cure for this sort of thing.”
A man sat down next to her on the bench, too close for comfort. He was singing “Proud Mary.” She didn’t want to look at his face but she saw that his hands were many days unwashed. His right leg bounced frenziedly. Three bright white swans on black water, unless her eyes were wrong. Big wheel keep on turning, Proud Mary keep on burning.
“Who’s that?” her mother said.
“I should go, Mom.”
“Well I should go too, hon. Gotta watch paint dry.”
* * *
She ran. She ran out of the park. She ran past something. At first she pretended that her eyes were making one of their errors, that it was a fallen ice cream sundae, a smudge of whipped cream, a spreading whorl of chocolate sauce, a drowning cherry. But it was smashed feathers, dark blood, swollen innards, wings extravagantly outflung, slime drying on pavement. She kept glancing back until she felt like a pervert.
Life.
File.
The beast whispered, gasped.
THIRTY
Mercifully, Hillary was on duty at the Four-Star Diner. Josephine spotted her hair through the big window, nothing as orange as that orange; she was leaning across the counter, talking to a customer.
Josephine forced herself to stop running, to enter the restaurant like a normal human being. People were sitting in booths, lingering over coffee and toast, chatting or reading the newspaper or looking at their phones. It was the most tranquil, mundane, indifferent scene in the universe.
No one seemed to notice her urgency as she beelined toward Hillary. And so absorbed was Hillary in studying her customer’s splayed palm that she didn’t notice Josephine either. The customer was a woman of late middle age, slightly overweight, with a soft concerned face; the type that struggles with constipation.
“… frequently desire the company of others,” Hillary was saying.
Josephine crept closer.
“You have a lot of unused capacity that you haven’t turned to your advantage,” Hillary said, squinting at the woman’s hand. “Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. Sometimes you have real doubts about whether you’ve made the right decision or done the right thing. You’re very critical of yourself.”
The woman released a heavy sigh.
“You’ve found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others,” Hillary continued thoughtfully. “Sometimes you’re affable and extroverted, but often you’re more wary and reserved. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker.”
“Stop it!” Josephine said, reaching between the two of them, breaking Hillary’s eye contact with the woman’s hand.
“Well hallelujah,” Hillary said. “Look who�
��s here!”
“That’s my fortune!” Josephine said, childish in her despair: She had come here to find out how he was going to die, and now she knew her artificial psychic couldn’t reveal a thing.
Hillary wasn’t sheepish.
“That’s everyone’s fortune, sugarplum!” she replied. “Anyway, I’m just a hobbyist.”
The customer was looking at Josephine with mild annoyance. “She’s a genius,” the woman said. “Every word she said, one hundred and ten percent true.”
“Even though you have a few personality weaknesses, you’re totally able to compensate for them,” Hillary informed the woman.
“Here’s another Zita for your collection.” Luminous with gratitude, the woman handed Hillary a thin wooden board pulled from her purse.
Hillary examined it, cooing with delight. Then she flipped the board so Josephine could see the painting.
In one hand the witch held a set of oversize keys and in the other an apple. It was one of those awkward folk-arty paintings in primary colors, the proportions all wrong, the head enormous, the mouth off-kilter. The eyes were big and messy, but somehow still looked straight out at you. Either the artist had made a mistake with the lines of the dress or the witch was meant to be a humpback. Josephine hated the painting. The apple looked like a handful of blood.
“Saint Zita,” Hillary explained. “The patron saint of waitresses and lost keys.”
“Did you know, my husband, he’s a plumber, there’s a patron saint for him,” the woman said. “There’s patron saints for frickin’ everyone.”
“Not for bureaucrats,” Josephine muttered.
“Oh sure there is,” Hillary said. “You just have to look it up in the index.”
“Well I guess I better shove off,” the woman said.
Josephine reached into her bag to touch his file. Her panic gave way to an excruciating sadness. Sadness that distorted her senses and transformed all colors into agents of cruelty. She closed her queasy eyes against their aggressions.
Then she was in a booth. Hillary sat close beside her on the red pleather. Was there or was there not a rose fragrance emanating from her royal purple uniform. Once more Josephine had the sensation of people staring at her. They frightened her, the people of the world. She was scared to look up, scared to observe the smiles and frowns on their faces. They were the spies of The Person with Bad Breath. The spoons were too, and the saltshaker, the napkin dispenser, the strand of hair; all of them keeping tabs on her, the thief. Again she shut her eyes.
The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel Page 10
