The Beautiful Bureaucrat (13 page)

Page tame no.

She grabbed three at random, and a few vegetables, a box of spaghetti, a chunk of Parmesan. The cashier’s collar was crooked, the left side jutting upward. Filled with pity, Josephine averted her eyes.

Back at the sublet by the highway entrance ramp, a number of the plants seemed to be dying. There was a text from her mother:
All okay in big bad city?
The bed was unmade and the laundry ungathered. Enigmatic odors arose from the trash can. In the kitchen, mice had already replaced the piles of turds Joseph wiped away this morning. She found it impossible to be fastidious nowadays. She filled a glass and watered a few of the limpest plants. Had they been given any watering instructions? Had Joseph said something about that when she wasn’t listening? She felt guilty.

But she felt bold too, as she sliced the garlic, as she turned on the gas, warmed the kitchen, that soothing smell of boiling pasta. She laid it out, this hard-won dinner, on the battered coffee table. He would be home any second now. She would hand him a beer; he would sink beside her into the stranger’s stained couch. They would eat dinner and then go to the movies or some other normal human activity. She couldn’t wait. She smiled. She stared at the door.

TWENTY-THREE

Josephine put the pomegranates in a bowl and placed the bowl on the coffee table across from her, as though it were a dinner companion. She sat among the plants and ate spaghetti and spaghetti and spaghetti until she was full. At long last, a little bit full.

She called him and left a voice mail. Afterward she was unsure what exactly she had said; it had been at a high volume, that she knew, and had involved a lot of cursing. For a second she felt fantastic, and then she felt dry, thirsty, and lonely.

She left the sublet, which now reeked of abandonment and dying foliage. The dull dusk had given way to a weird sunset, gray pocked with yellow. Weather for aliens. The temperature had plunged and a fitful wind blew highway dust into her eyes. She thought of the boxes containing her sweaters, her coat. The storage unit—she’d almost forgotten about it. She stood on the stoop of the building, shivered, watched cars travel up the ramp onto the highway. It was hard to believe pomegranates could grow anywhere on this planet.

She walked. She stepped over a small dead creature on the pavement. She stepped into a bar.
At times you have serious doubts about whether you’ve done the right thing.

As her third cocktail arrived, she thought guiltily of her Puritan ancestors, walking clear-eyed and clean-livered through fresh fields. She pressed her bag against her liver; a honeybee buzzed inside her.
You have a great deal of unused veracity
. But the wooden bar was so beautiful, glass bottles the colors of precious metals, and now she was shaking hands with joy, hands shaking with joy.

“What I’ve been worrying about lately—” someone said behind her.

The bar was filling up. Dark rain falling hard in darkness. She wanted to know what someone had been worrying about lately.

“—yes, a house of gold, if you can—”

“—which is the main difference between being—”

“—three! Seriously,
three
!”

Who were all these people?

At the far end of the bar, a man in a gray sweatshirt drank something stiff. When she lifted her glass to salute him, his smile was maybe sinister, maybe benevolent.

Security is one of your major goals in life.
Stop now. Drink water. Go home.
But you become dissatisfied when hemmed in.

“—so she starts to study all this stuff about marital—”

Mary tail.

Martial.

“—caress!”

Care ass.

Carcass.

“—here alone?”

It was a long time before she realized this question was addressed to her.

“No!” The gin added the exclamation point to her response.
You desire the company of others. You have found it unwise to feed yourself to others.

“So, what do you do for work?” the person persisted. Such an uncouth, painful question. A question like tapping on a bruise, pulling at a scab. The wooden stool melted beneath her.

“Whoa there, lady!”

She wondered where it was, the beloved voice that would transform “Whoa there, lady” into
So some shady
. She drifted toward the door on a glowing balloon of laughter and noise. Deep night had arrived. The sky was no longer yellow. She had to pee. She did a magic trick; she floated down the street elevated several inches above the sidewalk. The sidewalk was damp. There were parts of worms in the bottoms of her shoes. She had to pee. Someone grabbed her arm, jerked her back from the intersection. Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Wednesday, Monday, Saturday, Thursday. A laundromat, washers and dryers all filled with bright clothing, but the machines static, not spinning. A gorilla in the driver’s seat of a parked car. A transparent bird, a snagged plastic bag, a woman’s arm vanishing into a brick wall. Three luminous Coca-Cola trucks pulled up to a factory. An aquamarine flicker of tail in the narrow industrial canal; she’d always thought mermaids were limited to salt water. The cruel noise of keys, shoving, twisting, was she at the wrong door in the wrong building on the wrong street in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city in the wrong state in the wrong country on the wrong planet.

She fell through the doorway onto a couch in a jungle like the lady in the painting. Someone sat in the corner, slowly turning the pages of a book. Everyone knows that only murderers read books in the dark. Thick black hair sprouted from her nipples. She didn’t get invited to Trishiffany’s wedding. At the DMV they x-rayed her brain and discovered there an insurmountable fear of driving. A blind child crossed the street on a radiant tricycle. There was police tape across the door of her office.
Some of your respirations are unrealistic.
When she asked her parents how long they’d been married, one said
A few months
and the other said
A hundred years
. A demon queen perched atop a skyscraper glared out over a brown city.

Sometime after midnight: wakeful, hot, hungry, bloodshot, regretful, poisoned.

An insect whizzed near her ear.
Bob—bob
, went the insect.
Bob-bob-bob
, increasingly frenetic, enraging her. She flapped at it until it was gone.

Her bag, twisted on the floor beside the couch; her phone, dark in her bag. She pressed the circle and the screen lit to tell her
2:57
.

And to tell her: one voice mail from Joseph.

The insect was back.
Bob-bob-bob-bob-bobobbobbobbobbob!

“You little insomniac!” she taunted, swatted.

The insect dropped dead, tumbled onto her thigh, its legs bent.

She screamed, then wept. She stood up and went to the bathroom and clung to the sink and threw water at her face.

The voice mail was ninety-three seconds long. For the first eleven seconds, he was talking. His words were muddied beyond recognition. She couldn’t even get a sense of his tone—urgent or apologetic or calm or excited or nervous or nonchalant. For the next eighty-two seconds, she could hear him moving around. There was maybe the shuffle of papers or the shuffle of phone being returned to pocket, maybe the hiss of a swan or a woman or a heater, the sound of breathing or the sound of walking, click of stapler or plop of pebble into pond, and then, perhaps, a door being slammed, echoing, oceanic, or perhaps thunder, and then another moment of fuzz before the connection was lost.

She listened to the message three times, harboring hope that the distortion of his words was due to poor reception on her end rather than his, but each time the recording delivered identical indecipherability.

She called him. He didn’t answer. She called him. He didn’t answer.

I’m not the one who garnished our meal with glass
, Joseph said with an indecipherable smile. The air she breathed in her sleep blackened her lungs, yet her dreams contained snow, they contained forests.

TWENTY-FOUR

Josephine awoke pregnant.

It was a lackluster dawn, marks from the couch pressed into her skin like the letters of a strange alphabet. Two of the plants in the jungle were decidedly dead.

She could feel it inside, clinging; almost hurting. She didn’t know how she hadn’t known until now. The weird hungers, the dizziness. And that irrepressible voice, always twisting her language from within—his wordplay met her unrest, unified now in one being. She placed her hands over her stomach; it was a relief to comfort another living creature. She felt her loneliness lessening retroactively, to know their child had been with her all along.

“Hello,” she said aloud, shyly.

Eel ho, the baby replied.

But “baby” was too tame a word for this vitality. Beast, miniature beast, precious perfect beast just emerged from the blackness of the universe, rich with desires.

Her heart beat outrageously, like a tin can being slammed again and again with a rock. The divine, terrifying math.

1

2

4

8

16

32

64

128

256

512

1,024

2,048

4,096

8,192

16,384

32,768

65,536

131,072

262,144

524,288

1,048,576

2,097,152

4,194,304

8,388,608

16,777,216

33,554,432

67,108,864

134,217,728

268,435,456

536,870,912

1,073,741,824

2,147,483,648

There was a twenty-four-hour drugstore down the street. She knew; she didn’t need to take a test. Still, at 6:03 a.m. she was perched on the toilet in the stranger’s apartment, watching the ghostly blue lines appear.

The joy overmastered the hangover.

“I am so sorry about the drinks last night,” she muttered, praying she hadn’t ordered a fourth.

Nast light.

Gast fright.

“You!” she cried out, elated.

TWENTY-FIVE

By 6:56 a.m., she was in line behind a mother and three children at the only clinic in the neighborhood with early-morning hours. She gripped her health-insurance card in her hand, newly grateful for her job. She could have waited, researched obstetricians, made an appointment at a proper doctor’s office. But instead she’d thrown on sweatpants and torn out of the apartment as soon as she located the clinic in her insurance company’s online directory.

Because she wanted to start doing the right thing right away. She had been so negligent. She couldn’t wait a day, couldn’t wait eight hours, couldn’t wait two hours for someone official to say it aloud, acknowledge it and make it real. She could only wait four minutes, and then five, six—beginning to twitch with impatience—seven, eight, until 7:04 a.m., at which time a nurse in blue scrubs ambled up to the clinic and unfastened the padlock on the metal grating over the door.

“Doc’ll be here soon enough,” the nurse said, leading them into the waiting room.

“My kids got food poisoning or something,” the mother said. “Got chicken nuggets last night and they were all three up all night throwing up their brains.”